Sunnyvale homes, up close
An Eichler is mostly floor and glass. There is no attic, the ceilings are the roof, and the heating sits in the concrete under your feet, which rules out steam machines and standing water on the slab. What it does mean is a great deal of window: floor-to-ceiling panes in Birdland and Ponderosa Park that show every streak from the inside and every finger mark at knee height. Crews here work glass last, with a squeegee, in the shade.
The rest of the city is more ordinary and no less specific. Cherry Chase and Raynor Park are 1,300-square-foot ranch homes with carpeted bedrooms and a converted garage more often than not. Around the Heritage District and Murphy Avenue, the last decade has added mid-rise condo buildings where the whole unit is engineered flooring and everything comes in through one elevator.
The building stock here
The baseline here is a single-story house of 1,200 to 1,600 square feet on a flat lot, built between 1953 and 1968. Slab foundation, low-pitch roof, no basement, and in the Eichler tracts no crawlspace or attic either. Newer construction is vertical: the downtown condos and the townhome rows off Mathilda and Wolfe run two and three levels with hard flooring throughout and a shared garage below. The two types take very different amounts of time per bedroom.