Category: Local’s Guide

Park City brings one of the highest ratios of transplants of any city in Utah, and once you visit, it’s not difficult to see why. Whether you’re here for the mountains, the skiing, the mining town history, the dining or the clean air, you have to start somewhere. Here I’ll share my top tips for getting the most of your time in Park City, whether it’s just for a weekend or for the rest of your life.

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Park City Historic Home Tour This Saturday

This Saturday marks the annual Historic Home Tour here in Park City. As a Realtor I have unfettered access to pretty much any house on the market. But the historic home tour is fantastic in that I get access to historic homes that are not for sale. Every year the Park City Museum arranges a selection of homes in a few block section of the Old Town historic district.

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This year is the lower Woodside Ave and lower Park Ave tour. You purchase a ticket (early on the website or at the event), they give you a sticker to identify yourself with and a pamphlet of all the houses on the tour with their histories and old photos. The pamphlet by itself is worth the $20 (or $15 if you’re a museum member). Then you simply walk from house to house, spend as much time as you like ogling the doorknobs, perusing the historic documents and artifacts owners typically have displayed. A panel of people passionate about preservation.

(Alliteration for the win.)
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Caputo’s: Fine Pickle Purveyors

“HELLO MY NAME IS KRISTINA AND I LOVE ALL THE PICKLED THINGS.”

“Hi Kristina”

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Look, I’m not sorry. The minute the snow melts all I want on this earth is vinegar in all its forms. Salad dressings. Bread dipped in vinegar and oil. Sipping vinegar with seltzer. And of course, pickled things.

ALL of the pickled things. If there is a better way to improve a vegetable I haven’t found it.

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Beyond Thunderdome: Tips for Driving in the Snow

So it snows in Utah. Like, A LOT. Often. And in tremendous quantities.
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Inevitably, we will have a dramatic storm that dumps like a foot of snow and everybody will need to get to the same place at the same time and traffic will snarl to a halt.

Hundreds of angry drivers who needed a glass of wine an hour ago, all waiting, waiting, spinning, honking, waiting. Here are my top tips for maneuvering this frosty jungle.

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323 Park Ave: A Love Story

Hello, My name is Kristina and I have a thing for historic buildings. Particularly historic buildings in the Wild West. So lucky for me, I sell real estate in an old silver town turned ski resort. Two years ago I toured 323 Park Ave, A CONVERTED SWEDISH LUTHERAN CHURCH OMG. And, it’s now for sale. If it lasts that long, it’ll be on Open House tour Wednesday, December 9, 2015, and you’d be crazy to miss it. So get ready. Imma lay down some sick history beats.

323ParkAveI saw this house during the Park City Museum’s Historic Home Tour. If you’re ever in Park City in June you have to attend this event.

It’s just a few doors up from where I was living in Old Town and true to rumor, is a converted church and on the national historic registry and obviously the Historic Sites Inventory with Park City. An English-born butcher John William Bircumshaw (who also owned a saloon at 455 Main) deeded the land to St. John’s Swedish Lutheran Church in 1906. In 1907 the structure was built at a cost of $2,197 to serve the 31 local Lutherans (9 Swedes and 22 Finns, for those keeping score at home).

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Restaurant Review: Waffle Love Food Truck

I have a thing for baked goods. For crispy and chewy pastries, just barely sweet enough to make black coffee amazing. I also love the whole idea of food trucks, like fancy little trailers with baller kitchens. So when the Waffle Love food truck rolled over to Metro Title Company‘s open house I really had no choice.

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Waffle Love was parked in Park City for the Sundance Film Festival two years ago and though I missed a waffle at that point I have been thinking about it ever since. And particularly since my waffle iron got packed away in a “Kitchen B-List” box and hasn’t made it to the house yet. As any test of a baked good, try it plain first. If it’s not good without whipped cream or syrup or Nutella then it will just be lovely things on a crappy pastry. This was not a crappy pastry. My guess is it’s a yeast-raised waffle batter that they stick sugar cubes in once it’s in the iron.

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O Washer, My Washer: Top Tips for Laundromatting

The latest in my “Adventures of Old Home Ownership” series about my own experience owning an older home; a one-owner, 1955-built home in Sugarhouse (a hip suburb of Salt Lake City). Even an experienced agent like myself will run into unforeseen circumstances when it comes to these character-filled houses. The key is to take it all with a grain of salt, keep your sense of humor, and start buying beer by the case.

As a product of suburbia, there are many things I take for granted. Like a car. A parking space. On-site private laundry. When we bought this little charmer, I have to admit I thought we’d be just a warshing away in our own washer and dryer as I have done literally my entire life.

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For reasons having everything to do with having an old house full of surprises character (and ones that make for another post), we were not able to hook up our washer and dryer for four months. So I got to experience for the first time, in the sorry age of my 30s, just what the laundromat is all about.

1. Proximity. Choose a laundromat that is close-by. You want to keep the mileage on your underpants to a minimum (SORRYNOTSORRY). I chose Highland Coin Laundry.

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Restaurant Review: Fairweather Foods in Park City

So while I work on my rundown of everything cool I saw yesterday on Open House tour, and because it’s lunchtime and that’s all I can think about, I thought you’d like to see one of the places the locals go for a cheap, healthy lunch: Fairweather Foods.

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It’s over in the Prospector area of Park City, over by Windy Ridge restaurant and bakery and a bit more over from the Boneyard bar.

(It’s a pretty convenient location for me I am just saying.)

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