825-square-foot Mountain View home asks $1.88 million

The ad for 2006 Carol Avenue in Mountain View calls it “rustic but entirely inhabitable,” which does not really sound like a great vote of confidence at the outset.

Technically a positive statement, few homes should have to qualify themselves as “inhabitable,” being as that’s essentially the defining element of a home.

Despite how that may sound, the two-bed, one-bath, 1947 bungalow is not technically a teardown, nor even the most faulty fixer on the block. But it could use some serious love.

Those floors really need to go. And the fact the garage takes up more than a quarter of the overall space of the structure seems hardly ideal.

But the sight of this little ivory hideaway tucked beneath the boughs of the nearly overwhelming trees on a lot more than ten times its size (the home measures roughly 825-square-feet) can’t help but warm the heart of even the most hard-eyed home browser.

Realtor Daniel Berman compares 2006 Carol to Walden Pond, made famous in Henry David Thoreau's Walden. And while Mountain View is not nearly that secluded—this place sits immediately adjacent to an elementary school and only a couple of blocks from El Camino Real—the setting is charming enough to entertain the idea.

Yet the house on the shores of Walden probably didn’t cost $1.88 million, the list price here.

The naturalist writer later wrote, “Money is not needed to buy one [necessity] of the soul,” which is lucky, because there might not be much funding left over for soul solace after this down payment. Alas, another asking price signaling the need for more housing in Silicon Valley.

Note that over on Redfin this is only a slightly above average price in Mountain View. But it’s also nearly enough to buy an entire Russian Hill apartment building these days.

As the San Francisco Chronicle’s Amy Graff points out, the real attraction for any buyer here is presumably just the Mountain View land itself. As the old saying goes, they’re not making any more of it.

• 2006 Carol Avenue
• Walden [Lit Page]
• Mountain View Homes [Redfin]
• 1529 Mason Street [Redfin]