Boogie Nights

This takes the cake. We're continually fascinated and amazed at the things we see in people's basements. This house we looked at today evidently serves as the Columbia City Discotheque. What you can't see very well at the bottom is there is an actual hardwood dance floor built in. We were pretty much speechless when Chris fired up the lights and disco ball motor.

We looked at several houses today. All of them had potential on paper, though in the end only two stand as contenders. And like all the rest they have their faults. They could be made to work after several tens of thousands of dollars in remodeling and fix up. We'll keep them on the list while we try to finalize a draft of the house we want to build that will be suitable to find out how much that's going to cost.

Today, for the third time since we've been looking, we arrived at a house only to find the owners still home. Today's incident was by far the most exciting. We had been walking through this house for about 10 minutes when we made it to the master bedroom. We heard a radio on in the bathroom so I let Chris take the lead...and sure enough, you can about guess what happened. Ooops!! The owners and Chris shared a moment you can only imagine. They thought we weren't going to be there until 2:00. He had arranged for us to be there between 1:00 and 2:00. This type of time discrepancy has occurred twice before, far less dramatically. Not sure where the communication breakdown is, but suffice to say we were extremely careful entering the rest of the houses today.

Not too Soggy

Drove out to the property we are considering at lunch yesterday. It had rained like cats and dogs the day and night before so I thought this would be a good time to check and see how warranted our concerns over the drainage are. I haven't mentioned this before, but after the initial drop-off the property is pretty flat all the way out to a common area behind it, then it rises again before getting to the drop off for the small lake. We wondered if water might stand in the lawn after a rain. I am happy to report that it didn't. Well....it may have for a while, but by the time I got there (several hours after the rain stopped) there wasn't any standing water. This is very good sign considering I still saw water standing in quite a few other places in town.

As a side note, I finally measured the distance and time between it and Sweetwater. There are several slightly different routes that can be taken, but on the one I think I would take most of the time it came out to 9.6 miles and took me about 13 minutes. Not bad considering it will shave about 20 minutes off the drive for Liane.

Something is Missing

Notice something different?

(Don't you guys love it when your wife asks you a question like this? Nothing will freeze you in your tracks faster, because of course the real answer is, "No, but if you'll give me a minute to look around and think about it I might be able to come up with something." Guessing is a pretty dangerous undertaking though.)

We're in the process of making our house ready to put up for sale. Of course we still have no idea when it will actually go up for sale. Too many steps in the puzzle have to happen before we get there. Those of you who've been here before will recognize that we tore out the two cabinets over the peninsula. There's still some finish work to be done, but this is close to what it will look like. Definitely more open.

Funny thing about selling a house. That seems to be the time where you're supposed to fix and upgrade all of the shortcomings. I don't get it. We've been living here for years and it's been fine, but now that we're thinking of putting it up for sale we have to spend thousands of dollars upgrading things. Why wouldn't we have done this stuff before...so WE could enjoy it? It's like company is coming over and we have to suddenly clean up and fix everything.

Whatever. I go along because the prevailing opinions of the experts is to do this stuff. New countertops are next.

Hang in There

If anyone is actually reading this I just want to let you know that the real excitement hasn't started yet. So hang in there. I promise it is going to get more interesting at some point. Just how interesting remains to be seen...

And feel free to post your comments.

More Changes

Last night we spoke with Nicole to discuss some of the changes in the layout we are working on. There are a variety of issues still being sorted out, including: size of garage, size and configuration of master closet and bathroom, and mostly just how to fit all that stuff elegantly at the east end of the house. It's proving to be difficult, which I knew would be the case after having done some of my own sketches early on while I was working on getting some ideas more codified in my mind.

There's also the issue of the kitchen...and here comes the part that's embarrassing, and probably a sad commentary on our lives to some extent...but...we want everyone in the kitchen to be able to see a TV. Liane just loves to watch TV whenever and wherever she is working. She doesn't really watch it that much, mind you, she just has it on in the background sort of loosely following along with whatever is going on. Of course this is usually either reality TV of some sort or something like Oprah. Whew! Women yacking away or crying. Wears me out sometimes. In the kitchen space (which for these purposes includes three separate areas (not counting the screened porch)) she wants to have TV available in the hearth area, for her while preparing food, and for anyone who may be sitting at the bar. A look at the layout makes it clear this will be really hard to do with only one TV. We've been exploring alternate layout ideas to see if we can make it better (more on that to come). One of the more promising ideas has been to rotate the bar 90 degrees and change the kitchen dimensions a bit. Nicole is pursuing several variations at once right now. More to come...

What is it with GOLF??!!

We met Chris again today at Eagle Glen to look at another house. This one backs up to the first hole of the course just like the one we looked at the other day. It's a few doors closer to the tee. This is one of the first ones we've looked at that had a configuration we might be able to live with, and the price seems right, though it's not perfect. But first....what is the obsession people have with golf? I think this is the third house we've looked at with some goofy golf mural on one of the walls.

And there's just golf stuff everywhere: statues, pictures, paintings, posters. I get that this subdivision is built with a golf course, but wow. Over the weekend we visited some relatives in Louisville (also to see their house) and the entire basement was all about golf. Golf people sure do love golf. I have my obsessions too, but you don't see me painting murals of guitars and synthesizers on my walls. I don't even have a picture of Kobe or Roger Staubach displayed anywhere in my house. Whew.

Other than the entire decor having to go this house is a serious contender. But there are quite a few compromises. For starters I figure we'd have to spend an additional $30k to $50k to get all of the remodeling done we'd want to do. And though that along with the purchase price is likely considerably less than building there would still several compromises we'd have to live with. There just isn't quite enough room. The bathroom would never be able to have the type of shower I'd really like. The master closet is too small, with no easy way to make it big enough....a problem we've seen in almost every house we've visited. The laundry room is in the basement, rather than on the floor with the bedrooms. No screened porch, although it looks like there is a place to add one. Kitchen would have to be completely redone from the ground up, and even then is still smaller than ideal. Most of the space we'd really use isn't much bigger than what we have now. But given all that we do like the general layout and if it turns out to be a big enough savings we might consider it.

Still need to find out what it will really cost to build before we can compare.

Banished to the Basement

The basement has been a little controversial. We both agree we want one, but its purpose has been in dispute. Liane wants all of my "man room" stuff in the basement, which primarily amounts to a studio/office and home theater (nothing elaborate). Her reasoning for this is due to our thermomic incompatibility: she runs cold and I run hot. In our current house my space has been in the loft, which I really like, except it often gets warmer than the rest of the house. She's sometimes on the ground floor freezing while I'm in the loft burning up. So if I am in the basement it will be easy to keep me cool, while she can be comfortable upstairs. Logical enough I guess, but I'll really miss the overview of the house and the neighborhood I have from my loft. I've argued that with dual HVAC systems the temperature variation can be largely managed, but she isn't buying...so to the basement I go...

The plans for the basement are still in flux. Aside from the layout still changing, we don't know how much of it we want to finish. All to be determined as we zero in on other details. There are two main demands I have if I am to be banished to the lower chambers:

1) The basement must be walkout style. This has less to do with me needing to get outside from the basement and more to do with the overall feel of it. Walkouts are decidedly less cave-like than even daylight basements.

2) Noise from above must be minimized. I hate hearing the impact noise of people walking around upstairs when I'm in a basement. I still have to determine the best way to accomplish this, but suspect it will be some combination of material on the floor above and isolation on the joists below. Fortunately I have some access to a world renowned acoustician and studio designer in Russ Berger to help figure out the most practical way to tackle it. Also, this is one reason why the bedrooms changed ends. I did not under any circumstances want my studio space near the kitchen above, and likewise I did not want any noise I might be making in the studio to disturb Liane while sleeping. So we put the master bedroom and kitchen at the same end of the house, and will put the studio below at the opposite end. (Of course there are other factors that impacted the placement of the bedrooms that have been covered in prior posts.)

Zeroing In

We obtained a sketch of Draft #2 from Nicole last night. Now most of the major parts are in about the right place, though there are still some details we're changing or as yet unsure about.

This is the main floor. As it stands right now there would be a loft above and a nearly full basement below. I say "nearly" full because the whole master bathroom area will be on the garage slab. This is evidently the best way to be able to achieve the variation in the floor that I want. One of my criteria is to not have to step up, down, or over anything to get into the shower. I want the floor to be flat. Well, that means the base of the shower has to be recessed to provide a way to build the drainage slope. If the bathroom were on regular second floor joists this presents a significant challenge. Actually this idea presents some challenges too, in the form of plumbing, but so far they're the lesser of the two. I've also been told that two large slabs is another complication we want to avoid. So my idea has been to keep it with the garage slab and have them be one. The retaining wall for the basement will follow the outline of the bathroom.

One of the main differences between this and the first draft is that the bedrooms have swapped ends of the house. This is because of how things work out against the basement. We have some specific ideas about how the basement needs to be done, but all of that is a story for a later post.

You'll also notice how much less the garage protrudes from the front of the house. I've decided I don't like houses where the facade is dominated by garage (which is what I have now). I definitely want a "side load" (garage entrance on side of house), and if possible I still don't want the garage structure to extend far beyond the front facade of the house. This plan achieves that, and even though the garage isn't completely side loading it would actually work very well against the primary property we are considering.

Back to the Golf Course

We met Chris and looked through a couple of houses at Eagle Glen over my lunch break today. One of them was the house we drove by the other day, which backs up to woods. The other one overlooks the first hole of the golf course.

The second one had a rather significant error in the listing, which indicated the master bedroom was on the main floor. It turns out it was on the upstairs floor with all the rest. Not a complete show-stopper; just not what we want. Then we discovered that the washer and dryer are in the basement. No deal. There was very little about it we liked actually, though the view out the back isn't bad.

The first one could contend. It would require a lot of work to get it where we'd be comfortable, and even then it would definitely be a compromise. We'd have to turn the office/bedroom into a closet to have the space we'd need. The screened in porch looks like it was supposed to be a three season room that was aborted, ultimately making it a terrible screened porch. Of course virtually all of the decor in every house we look at would have to go. Yuck! This one is no exception.

So....at the end of the day today we're still thinking build, depending on how much it's really going to cost, which we can't determine until we have plans from Nicole that are close. She supposedly has a rough draft ready for us. So we need to get that and go over it. Hopefully we'll soon be talking to the builder about it.

House Photography

Several months ago I began taking photographs of our house in anticipation of putting it up for sale this summer. On web listings it's easy to show many photos, but there's always one, main photo associated with each listing on search results, and of course only one photo can be used with any paper based listing.

I knew it might be tricky getting one good photo so I wanted to make sure I took pictures before everything grew out, and during the blooming season so we could choose the best ones when the time came. I was somewhat scientific about it. I marked off spots on the sidewalk across the street where I’d place the tripod so I could be consistent, thinking I might use Photoshop to merge a couple of shots together later. I bracketed the exposures, shot at different angles, distances and zoom settings. I shot on days with various lighting and weather conditions as well. Normally subjects like this look a lot better when the sky is blue and the sun is overhead or behind the camera. Given the orientation of the house that angle isn’t possible, and when the sun is out strong there are shadows on the front of the house, so I may have to end up in Photoshop bring those shadows out. Or I may have to end up using a shot from an overcast day and then placing a better looking sky into it, which will not be easy since I have to work around at least one tree with sky in the background. I find it strange how little attention seems to be paid to this sort of thing in some of the house listings I see. Sometimes an expensive house will be shown with a crummy little snapshot and an overcast sky in the background.

At any rate I now have lot of pics of the front of the house, nearly all of which don’t show it effectively. It’s a hard house to shoot because a tree obscures the area around the front door, one of the main points of interest in any house, unless the photo is taken at an angle that obscures other areas of interest. There’s just no way to get one, good shot of the whole front.

Shot in late April -- Unacceptable because of overcast sky and the tree has no growth on it. Part of it could be used.

Shot late May -- Unacceptable because blooms make it look like spring, and the left tree obscures the nicest looking part of the front of the house.

Shot late June -- Unacceptable because front is lost in shadows (can be fixed) and right tree obscures the doorway.

Of course as I set about reviewing some of the photos later, with an eye toward possibly using the best parts of shots from different times, Liane tells me that I don’t want to use any of the shots with blooms in them because that connotes that it’s spring, and if we put the house up for sale in the late summer (which is likely the soonest it will happen) photos with blooms in them will make it seem like it has been on the market a long time already. Sigh. I tried to resist asking why she let me take all those photos in the first place, but couldn’t. Needless to say a minor argument over who said what to whom when ensued.

Currently the plan is to trim the tress and try it again. Hopefully I'll be able to piece enough parts together to come up with something acceptable.