Our first house was in Pacific, Wa. It was a great starter home, but we promised eachother that the next house we bought, we would stay in for a long time and raise our family there. Criteria for our new home was a large garage for some storage but mostly for hobbies, and lots of land for all
sorts of reasons. We searched nonchalantly for a year or so, and then this last June we found 'it.' The house of our dreams... yes it had/has work, a lot of work, but the potential was/is far greater. It is a rambler with an extended three car garage -- All on 5 acres.
Here is the outside entry of our new home. (above)
There is the most beautiful tiled entry way, that leads to a large kitchen and a connected living room and dining room. The master bedroom is so huge, it fits a king bed, a small reading area and still has room for doing cartwheels. hahaha The master bath is lovely with a tiled double headed shower and a jacuzzi tub. There are two other rooms, for our future children and their bathroom. Beneath the living courters, is a full unfinished basement. Our plans for that are to eventually make a rec room with a wet bar, pool table and small theater in the main area. We also plan to make a sound studio down there for Eric's band. It is already hooked up with electricity, and plumbing (there is a bathroom and laundry room down there as well). All the framing is done, now it is the time to start drywalling. Indoor summer project.
We did a lot of clearing last summer. When we moved in last summer, the weeds/grass was over four feet high, and touching the house. With a weed wacker, I cleared a bit over an acre that surrounded the house... we now have a front, side and back yards. In the side yard, I built a goat pen, where we have four Pigmy Goats. Just last week, Eric finishied the chicken coop on the back side of the pen.
The outdoor summer project is to start landscaping. I want to continue clearing some areas, especially two areas where I am going to place a rose garden and another spot for a vegetable garden.
These are all the wonderful things about our house. However there were a few hard months in the beginning of living here. We were told there were some small dry rot areas that needed to be fixed before we bought, but when we atarted getting bids to fix that problem, we found that those areas were far BIGGER then we had anticipated. We had to take off a 3rd of our tile roof, half of the walls on the front of the house (where I came home one night to our front door lying in the grass and ply wood nailed to where the door should have been, and a blue tarp along the entire living room wall (theliving room window was propped up again the garage door, and is 5' by 7' andthere are two of them). I had to go in through the back door and when I went into the living room, I saw 2x4's and blue tarp... anyone could have easily lifted the tarp and come in... hahaha.... then when that was almost done, they found a HUGE nest of carpenter ants in an interior wall, so they had to take apart some of what they had done to take out that wall... and after that (mind you the tile for the roof is on the front grass) they went after the back dinning room and kitchen exterior walls, (so about 1/3 of theback of the house was blue tarped). From the road, looking down to our house, all one could see was blue... our house was literaly covered in tarps. So a little under two months we lived in our bedroom, running out into the cold to go to the kitchen to get food. We could look up at the 'ceiling' in our entry way and saw blue tarp... and when it rained, the guys didnt have plywood under the tarp in all the areas, so it started to pool.... and Eric was at work, so I, in the rain, had to borrow a 10 footladder from our neighbors that live a bit away, get on our 'roof' which was slippery tile in some areas, or rotting cross beams in others, and with a pitcher, start pouring out the water from the pools... as it was raining too.... then attempt to place small pieces of wood under the tarp so that it would stoppooling. yeah... that was fun. hahaha... Luckily that same neighbor saw me struggle, and came to help out.Our house is now very nice and new, at least on those walls. :)
Here are some photos of the house, before and after.
The back window, you can see where the workers started to tear away the siding.
(left)
Here is another view of the back, we took the window out and replaced it with some double doors. We are going to add on to the deck too!! You can see how much of the wall they had to tear out completely and replace.
(right)
This is the entry way. This is taken from standing in the kitchen, looking toward the front door (which is laying in the grass in the front yard). If you look at the top of the photo, you can see plastic hanging down.... that is from the roof. When we stood under that spot, there were days we could see the clouds, literally.
This last winter, we got alot of snow. Here is a nice shot of the length of our house and part of our front yard covered in snow.
This spring, I will post many more shots of the improvements and additions!!
Wish us LUCK!!
