A couple's house-hunting nightmare

Adam and Leticia Hewitt's adventure in Puget Sound-area home buying began innocuously enough, with Adam dutifully researching the housing market to allay the couple's anxieties over their move north.

From their four-bedroom house in a quiet Vancouver, Wash., subdivision — a house they bought new in 2001 for just under $180,000 — Adam Hewitt surfed real-estate Web sites, looking for a comparable place as their soon-to-be new home.

"I was naïve," he said, six months in retrospect. "I didn't know the geography of the area. I'd see a place in Federal Way or Auburn or Marysville — 2,500 square feet for around $320,000 — and say, 'Hey, look at this nice house!'

"I never bothered to Mapquest to measure the distances of those houses to the Starbucks general office."

The manager of a Starbucks store in Portland, the 32-year-old accepted a promotion in February to financial analyst in the corporate office south of downtown Seattle. But the thrill of career advancement spiraled into distress as the couple searched for an affordable place to live.

"My 'aha' moment came when my manager at Starbucks, who moved from New Jersey, corrected me: 'Oh no, Adam. New Jersey is cheap compared to Seattle.' I knew New Jersey was not cheap."

Leticia, a 35-year-old registered nurse, got a job at the Polyclinic on First Hill.

"All I kept hearing about Seattle was that traffic was terrible," she said. "Everyone said that we may as well spend more on housing to live closer to work, that the investment would be worth it in time saved on the commute."

The art of compromise

The couple set parameters for a new home: It had to be a good place to raise a family, as the Hewitts plan to welcome their first child in the spring, a baby girl adopted from China. Basset hounds Max and Sadie also had to be comfortable.

It had to have a bay window, an island kitchen and close to the same amount of square footage as their Vancouver place. They preferred four bedrooms and new or recent construction.

With their Vancouver house listing for $299,900, the Hewitts hoped to get all they wanted for no more than $425,000.

They started searching Seattle and the Eastside. Their must-haves quickly turned into maybe-we-can-do-withouts.

Their agent, Cheryl Stewart of Lake & Co. Real Estate in Seattle, sent Adam as many as three e-mails a day of property listings. They cast a wide net geographically, her years of experience telling her that what the couple had to have, they likely were not going to get in Seattle or on the Eastside.

"I try not to tell my clients anything; I try to show them," she said. "You have to take them out and let them understand what they can buy. It's a process they must go through."

Leticia figures they visited about 35 houses. "Oh, at least," Stewart said.

The couple eventually looked at areas farther out.

"It was the final compromise," Leticia said. "The question eventually became: How far do we want to commute?"

"Our emotional low"

After Adam started his new job in Seattle, co-workers at Starbucks offered good-intentioned advice.

"Live in Issaquah," they said. "It's great there and the housing is affordable."

Adam explored Issaquah and found houses selling for as low as $600,000 and as high as seven figures.

"They were right — it is great out in Issaquah. But the housing is not affordable. I began to realize that everyone I was talking to was high up in corporate and making a lot more money than I was."

Issaquah would work only as a place to rent while looking for a place to buy. Even with a discount for Starbucks corporate employees, the rent for their Issaquah townhouse was $100 more a month than their mortgage in Vancouver.

When Leticia got to town, the couple started searching Seattle's North End. They didn't get a house, but they did get perspective.

They went into an impeccably renovated three-bedroom, turn-of-the-century beauty in Greenlake. They could totally see themselves living there — except that the house was listed at more than $1 million.

They drove to West Seattle to see a house in their price range. In the neighborhood, they saw a sign posted outside a convenience store near the high school that said something like: "We know you students are thieves. Only one student inside at a time."

They couldn't see themselves living there.

"That was our emotional low," Adam said. "I was ready to call Starbucks and say I wanted my old job back. We realized at that point that Seattle was fun to visit, but we couldn't afford to live there."

It was time to regroup.

While visiting the Seattle area in 2003, the Hewitts had gotten lost and ended up in Maple Valley. There, they stumbled across a new housing development with nice homes selling for about $300,000.

The couple went back and realized that similar homes now were selling for about $450,000.

They turned their gaze north. They looked at ramblers with two fireplaces — but not two bathrooms. While touring a split-level in Shoreline, Leticia's foot went through the rotted wood of the deck.

They fell for a house in Edmonds they called "concrete house" because of its polished concrete floors. Out back, it had tiki lights, a hammock, bar and refrigerator stocked with beer. It was a party house, but was it a Hewitt house?

The master bedroom was too small to fit a queen bed but, for some odd reason, had a sink. They figured they would have to knock down or add a wall, replace windows and put on a new roof. Still, they considered submitting an offer.

"Everything else we had seen up to that point had been awful," Adam said.

But Stewart sensed that the house wasn't right. "I told them we'd come back the next day with a different set of eyes."

They did and saw it for what it was — a great house, for someone else.

Too good to be true

They visited another house in Edmonds within their price range — a beautiful one-story with skylights, French doors off the master bedroom and a huge yard. But by the time the Hewitts were ready to submit an offer, the owners had accepted another.

Then, finally, a break!

Financing for the offer fell through and the house was back on the market. The couple returned for a second look. By then, all the nice furnishings — put there by a professional staging company to make the house look attractive — had been removed. Holes in the walls and flaws in the floors that had been strategically covered were now exposed.

"When we went back, we said, 'What happened to the house we saw?' " Leticia said.

Next up, a 2,800-square-foot house in Lake Forest Park on a gigantic lot — selling in the low $400,000s. A little dowdy but with good bones, the house seemed too good to be true.

It was.

Looking out from the deck, Adam noticed the house behind it was the home of a beekeeper, and that the only thing separating the bees from the house was a retaining wall that appeared ready to fall down.

A house in Mountlake Terrace looked like a steal, too. Built in 2005, it offered 2,300 square feet, crown moldings, an island kitchen, a bay window and a wrap-around porch.

"It was on the freeway," Adam said. "You had this beautiful house silhouetted by Interstate 5."

Success! (at last)

The couple finally found their dream house within the Red Oaks subdivision in north Lynnwood, a house that had been on the market since February but had not yet sold because two offers had fallen through.

Built in 2001, the house is on a cul-de-sac and backs up to a protected wetland. It features four bedrooms, 2 ½ bathrooms, an island kitchen, a bay window in the master bedroom, a den with built-in bookshelves and French doors, nice light fixtures and attractive paint colors.

"It was a slam dunk," Adam said. And the couple got it for $397,000, "below our budget, which is just fine." They moved in Aug. 20.

But what about that final compromise?

Each morning at 6, the Hewitts commute together into Seattle, using the I-5 carpool lane, with the goal to reach Leticia's clinic by 6:45. Adam then continues on to Sodo. On those days that Leticia's shifts start later, she kills time on First Hill, drinking coffee and reading the newspaper.

When Leticia's shift ends around 3, she walks the two miles from First Hill to Sodo and calls it her daily exercise. They leave for home at 5 p.m.

The commute still is so fresh that Adam is timing the compromise each afternoon.

"Forty-two minutes," he said about one recent commute home. "But yesterday, it was only 32."

Stuart Eskenazi: 206-464-2293 or seskenazi@seattletimes.com