I started blogging about our new home a few days ago, but I didn’t have any photos.  On Sunday I went out with my camera and finally shot some photos around the complex.  If you want photos of the inside, you’ll have to wait a bit longer as everything is still in flux.   Perhaps you’re as eager as our little friend here, he visits us about twice a day.

Although it seems now like poof! Sam and I just moved in together and found this place in a hurry, it was actually a long drawn out process.  We looked at many homes over many months and considered many more.  We took a business approach to the search (as you’d expect from a couple that met in business school) and kept a lengthy detailed spreadsheet of our hunting.  We had ten distinct variables in the spreadsheet to grade properties by.  We entered over 100 properties for review, toured 39 of them, and made official offers on three of them (there would have been a fourth and fifth, but we were beaten to the punch on a Ray Kappe property and denied funding for a UCLA property with a renter ratio too high).  Only one offer was accepted, but we had to go through 6 counter-offers with the seller (a brutal process which, we’ve heard, is now becoming the norm in a tight market).  But enough about that… on to the photos of the place…

So I lied.  I took one shot of Sam cooking in the new kitchen:

I mentioned before that our patio had to be replaced.  Below is a before shot (where you can’t see the water damage).

And here, below, is how it looks as of today – the basic work will be finished some time this week, then we’ll probably finish the “garden” part after we return from Thailand in August.

Step outside the patio and you can see the long stone path that leads around the back of the building:

Which terminates in this nice grassy area:

On the opposite side of the building is a dog park:

Tennis Courts:

Now we’ll go down the road a bit.  As I walked down to get these shots I realized this wasn’t entirely legal.  There was no sidewalk and “no pedestrians” signs posted on the bridge.  Oh well.  Below is a shot looking down toward Hollywood from the bridge across the 101 freeway.

And turning around, a view of the freeway heading north.  On the right side up the street is the entrance to our complex.

And, if you’re travelling north up Cahuenga boulevard you’ll come to the sign just before the entrance:

After passing through the entrance you can see the office on the left and tennis courts on the right, as well as a little garden to the far right.  I’m going to put day and night photos of a few locations below as I went out around 9pm Sunday night to take more photos of the same locations at night.

Our third floor neighbor’s balcony spout was dripping onto our patio all day.  Around 7pm I had had enough (surely this couldn’t be from overflowing planters after 7 hours) and went to knock on their door.  There was no response, but I noticed at the end of the hallway a “sun deck” that nobody had ever told us about.  This deck has a view looking south into Hollywood and beyond.

When I went out at night I explored more of the complex than I’d seen before.  I took shots of our “regular” pool by our building.

Then I climbed the long garden laced staircases between buildings to see if I could find find another pool we’d only heard about.

Climbing up further still, to the last building on that side of the hill, I found a high vantage point.

From this point you can see down into Hollywood and below.  That building in the front of the complex (on the left) is our building.  The orange lights streaming from the right side towards the middle are from the 101 freeway.  The bright lights in the center at the base of the hill is Hollywood and Highland.  You can’t see it, but just on the other side of the hill on the right is the Hollywood Bowl.  Just on the other side of the hills on the left is the Hollywood Reservoir.