Down with the tree

Believe it or not, Brian and I put an offer on this house without even seeing it. The owners put it on the market but weren't doing showings for another couple of weeks, and we knew it would go fast.  So we checked the size of the lot, put a lot of contingency language that would get us out if we realized we just made the biggest mistake of our lives, and said a prayer.  

So when we actually got the chance to look at the house that we were buying, one of the things we loved was this 150+ year old tree in the backyard.  We loved it right up until we bought the house and realized it took up all our yard, its roots were growing into our sewer line and cracking it, and it probably was about to fall over on our house due to being stressed from drought.  So, down it came.  This is what the backyard looked like with the garage and junk of the previous owners:

I drove by last week after they had taken it down (along with the garage) and almost crashed my car.  It's amazing how much bigger the lot actually looks when all of the overgrown plants and shrubbery are ripped out.

Now we have moved on to picking out finishes.  4 hours at Ferguson made me need a drink badly.  But we got a lot done and someday soon you'll be sitting on this in our guest bathroom!

Stolen Porch and a Man Cave

I don't have much of an update - we are in the waiting period of permitting which could take 8-10 weeks.  However, a few major demo items have been completed.

1.  Someone stole our porch!  Thank God.  See ya old porch, can't wait for our new one.

2.  Brian is dreaming big dreams for his basement man cave.  Gone is the green shag carpet and wood paneling but other manly things will take their place.  Most likely surround sound and blackout shades and an obscenely large TV.

Designing Bathrooms Around a Window

We are officially almost done with the design process - at least for the floor plans and the elevations (what the house will look like from the outside).  Next up - tile and paint and woodwork and built-ins and more....Thank God for Houzz.com, because we've got the basic aesthetics down after hours of ideabooks and pinning.

Now I totally understand why some houses look funny from the outside.  It is quite a task trying to place windows and doors while making the inside functional and the outside look good.  I think we redesigned our Master bathroom at least 5 times trying to figure out how to get the window placement just right on the front left of the house.  

Here's an example:

Weird, right?  The upstairs left windows are too small - because we had our shower on that front wall.  So we moved the shower and bathtub around and ended up with this:

Another weird thing about elevations is that because they aren't 3D, it's hard to tell the depth of some areas.  The door on the left of the house is actually about 50 feet back and is a door into the garage that you can't even see from the street - not a random shed on the side of our house like I thought the first time I saw this.