I just thought I’d post a few pictures of my new house, it’s pretty nice compared to the rest of the houses in my town. It’s an old country home, but recently entirely redone and built in 1917. I don’t think that the Realtor did an excellent job taking the pictures because some of the rooms look smaller than they actually are, one day I’ll take better pictures and figure out how to get them onto the computer so I can post them.
Here they are:
Front of the house. To keep the star or not keep the star…that is the question.
Kitchen 1 (The stainless steel appliances stayed!!! I drive a hard bargain.)
Kitchen 2 (No more hand-washing dishes!)
Dining Room (This room actually is a bit small, not quite that small, but overall the picture is OK.)
This would be the upstairs bathroom, and from a weird angle at that, it’s twice that size. I don’t know why they didn’t take any pictures of the downstairs bathroom. They didn’t take any of the bedrooms or den (Now, my kid’s playroom) either.
This is the living room, but again, the picture makes it look smaller than it is.
The only thing missing from this picture is the vegetable garden, but that needs some work anyway. I think the previous owner decided that she was going to sell the house, so she completely ignored the vegetable garden.
Here are the grape vines, did someone say homemade wine?
Nice house. I like the country looking lot that has room for a garden. You may need it to grow food and keep chickens when the economy blows up, y’know? I think the star looks a little strange, though. Like there’s some sort of cult and it’s a secret beacon to the “Others”. But that probably says more about how I think than about the previous owner who probably just liked how patriotic it looked in the catalog, lol.
And everything’s so lovely and green…but I grew up in Cleveland, dude, so am not fooled. I wanna see the pix in January when it’s under 3 feet of snow. ha!
You don’t see old houses like that where I live. In most of California, 1960’s is old, except for when you get in to the areas where there are Victorians and Edwardians. I like them a lot, but the only one I could ever afford to make an offer on belonged to a serial killer 20 years ago. It had been completely rehabbed, since the cops knocked out most of the walls looking for bodies. Certified corpse free, though, which you can’t say about most resale houses. I didn’t get the house, but thought it would’ve been great for Halloween parties.
Actually, when I said the only thing missing from the picture is the vegetable garden, I was being literal. The tree on the right of the picture is blocking you from seeing it! Actually, you can kind of see part of it to the left of the tree and behind and to the right of the garage, but that’s just weeds overgrowing the damn thing. The previous owner just let it go when she decided she was going to sell, personally, I’d still like fresh vegetables while I was living there (it was sold owner-occupied) but, who knows?
I think you’re right about the patriotic thing, many houses out my way have a star on them. I like the idea of putting something there because there is so much empty space between the windows, but I’m going to try to come up with something better than that.
LOL
It will just be lovely and white at that time. Now, you’re talking about my kind of season. Homemade soups, fresh-baked bread, fluffy blankets and classic literature. On the masculine side, shovelling snow up to my thighs, playing football, sled-riding with the kid, building snowforts and getting on a ladder to sweep the snow off the porch roof…just so that I can say that I got on a ladder to sweep snow off the porch roof. I’ll make up some bullshit reason like it being too much weight for the porch roof, or something like that.
Either way, winter is my favorite season because the weather gives me plenty to do outside, but also serves as an excuse to stay inside. I’ll miss summer in the sense that I’m much more physically productive in the summer, but I have more time to cook, write, read, play football and do everything in-between in the winter.
That’s kind of a shame that you don’t see that many out that way. With regular preventive maintenance and a top-to-bottom renovation every twenty years or so, they can continue to be excellent properties.
That house would have been terrific for Halloween parties, especially if you could find old newspaper clippings about the slayings and line a few of the rooms (especially something like the bathroom, where the person in there is typically alone) with them.
That’s great, Pav. Home ownership is always a mixed blessing. You’ve just increased the honey-do list about 10 times, but it’s YOUR castle! There is something about that not easily replaced by renting no matter how nice the rental…
Chiming in on the star: Get rid of it. Originally, the star was one of the old Amish hex signs placed on a barn. Some cutesy designer thought it would look wonderful in a prominant place on a house. It may have - for about 30 seconds. The originals were carved wood and some were quite a show of artisan talent. Now they are a plastic replica made in China and available at Walmart. That ought to tell you something.
Consider: Look at the room behing the exterior wall and think about a nice bay window with window box seating? Sure, more money, but architectual interest inside and out. Just sumpin’ to think about…
Soviet chic is only going to be fashionable for a couple more months, besides Only_Humean everybody has out-voted you, including my wife!
Thanks for the congratulations, Tab and Tentative. Chances are I’m just going to wait until November and replace it with some kind of monster Christmas wreath, given the typical level of motivation for people around here, I can probably leave that wreath up until Mid-April and nobody will think anything of it. By then, I’ll have probably figured something out to put up there permanently, of course, if the actual wooden stars are considered classy we do have some Amish around here, so I can go see how much they want to make me one.
I wish I could put a window like that in there. The reason why I can’t is because that the area in between those two windows is part my bedroom, part my kid’s bedroom and part walk-in closet for his bedroom. Although, that did remind me that I need to get a couple of, “Tot Finder,” signs for his windows, so definitely thank you for that.
The location is the best part. I’m a stone throw (3/4ths of a mile) from my in-laws house, so I pulled the kid over there in his wagon and helped my Father-In-Law split and stack wood for about two-and-a-half hours for his woodburning stove. After that, my son and I walked back home (Technically, he rode back home) and we ate lunch and watched football for two hours, then I got ready for work.
The people in your town actually take down the christmas wreath in April? We usually leave 'em up till the middle of June. No sense in getting in a hurry. And all those lights strung up along the eves? Never take 'em down. Remember what a bitch it was to put 'em up in the first place? Damn near fell off the ladder twice. Leave them up there. Of course, the creche display, the blow-up snowman, the plywood Santa sleigh and reindeer will have to be moved off the lawn by the end of July for the semi-annual lawn mowing. You can mow around the old washer and dryer…
If they take them down in Mid-June, then when do they put them back up? If you wait that long into the year, there’s not really a point in taking them down.
When it comes to the lights, the one thing that I have noticed is that people with multi-colored lights will take them down reasonably early in the year, but the people with all yellow lights just leave them out.
I love that one about the semi-annual lawn mowing around the washer and dryer, I might borrow it sometime, but I’ll give you credit.
Faust,
Thanks for all the compliments about the house. The kick-ass thing is that I also have a one-car attached garage on the back of the house with the most old school garage door you’ve ever seen. I plan to restore the garage door, it’s probably some kind of antique, not really, but it could be.
The yard is huge and relatively flat.
We’re very fortunate that the house went up for sale when it did, we’d almost stopped looking and decided just to wait until next year. We were giving it one more week for the right house to become available.
