By 2012, Ellingwood had paid his lawyer more than $80,000, and in the chaos of fighting for his children, he stopped making his mortgage payments. To pay his lawyer, he planned to refinance his house, and his grandfather advanced him his inheritance. He and his wife each sued for sole custody. In 2009, Ellingwood’s older sister bought a house around the corner.īut shortly after the birth of Ellingwood’s second son, in June 2010, his marriage fell apart. The grandfather bought the house with his daughter, Ellingwood’s mother, and the first thing they did was tear down the fence between the two properties, creating one big family compound. When his 88-year-old grandfather, an emeritus professor of electrical engineering at the University of Houston, had a bad fall, Ellingwood urged him to move into the house for sale just across his backyard. He married on New Year’s Eve, and his wife gave birth to their first child, a son, in April. He put down $15,000 and sank the rest of his savings into a $250,000 bedroom addition and kitchen remodel, reasoning that this would increase the home’s value. When Ellingwood began speaking to lenders, he realized he could easily get a loan, even two this was the height of the bubble, when mortgage brokers were keen to generate mortgages, even risky ones, because the debt was being bundled together, securitized and spun into a dizzying array of bonds for a hefty profit. One of Ellingwood’s goals had always been to buy a house by the time he turned 30 - a birthday that unceremoniously came and went six months earlier. “The house was not in amazing shape,” Ellingwood said. The other was an A-frame, Swiss-chalet-style granny unit above the garage, where the owner displayed a toy train collection. Behind the house were a couple of small buildings, one of which was office-size - a meditation “Zen den,” Ellingwood thought. The pièce de résistance depicted a faerie woman with flowing hair whose fingers turned into peacock feathers.
FORECLOSED HOMES MORGAN HILL WINDOWS
Inside there was a “captain’s quarters” - a room designed to look like the hull of a boat with a built-in water bed and drawers - and numerous stained-glass windows that the couple who owned it had made themselves. He and his friend meandered past a pond to an inviting teal house built in 1958, “a whimsical masterpiece,” Ellingwood told me.
But when his best friend came across an intriguing listing in Woodland Hills - a bedroom community in Los Angeles County’s San Fernando Valley - the two men decided to visit on a whim.Įntering the property beneath the canopy of a grand deodar, Ellingwood, a big man with a gentle presence, felt as if he had been transported to a ranch house in Northern California, much like one he often visited as a child, all old growth and overgrown greenery - olive trees, citrus trees, sycamores and redwoods. Chad Ellingwood wasn’t really in the market for a home in the summer of 2006.
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