Solving a Problem in Carmel

This story caught my eye because Carmel has always been one of my favorite places.

It used to be a quiet California coastal village known for its bohemian artist's colony and its simple, craftsman style cottages, as Mary Keats reports on wsj.com. 

It's always had more than its share of tourists swarming the town.

But nowadays, she wrote, its narrow, wooded roads are jammed with upscale houses in a mishmash of styles with a median sales price of $1.7 million. 

That's why when Mary Ann Schicketanz found what she describes as a "teardown hippie shack" for $650,000 in 2012, she jumped at the chance to buy it—especially since it was on a fairly private lot on a quiet street up a hill from downtown, according to Keats. 

To see Schicketanz's transformation of the "shack":  http://kenallensforum.blogspot.com/