House hunter Joanna Grawunder’s first impression of the property at the base of Healdsburg’s Fitch Mountain was horror and a hard no. As she and husband Mark Jensen were scouting out weekend home possibilities along the Russian River in 2012, she recoiled as they approached one listing.
“I was screaming at him. Don’t stop! Just go!” she recalls. But her husband who had a hunch there might be more than meets the eye, insisted they have a look.
“As soon as we walked in — and we made sure not to fall through the floor or step on a rat — we saw this. It was so amazing,” she says, looking out from her deck at a gobsmacking stretch of the river where the water at this time of year pools calmly against a palisade of trees in the early evening sun.
That view is what sold them on a ramshackle house with numerous funky additions, that had been abandoned for two years. Pretty much anything that could be wrong with it was, from septic problems to termites…