Duds

I thought I would let my first few additions to this here blog be a tour through some of the "duds" that K. mentioned earlier. We looked at about 20 houses over the course of two weekends, of which we liked about 6. At some later point, I may write a bit about the Ones That Got Away, I thought I would start by showing you the ones we happily threw back.

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Strange House

strange house
Originally uploaded by galois.

strange house
Originally uploaded by galois.

This first house was one that could have a lot of potential as a cool funky house if one basically wanted to just save the shell and add to it. As you can see, it has a cool growing-out-of-the side-of-a-hill thing going on, and a slanted attic space that I never really understood. Despite what it looks like, it was a one story house, and all of the bedrooms were in a line on one side of the house, all with sliding doors opening up onto a basketball court.

strange bedroom
Originally uploaded by galois.

strange house interior
Originally uploaded by galois.

Luckily, the idea of gutting everything and starting with a shell would have been much easier given that the house was already pretty well gutted. Yes, that first picture is one of the bedrooms. Thank God that the one thing they left was the strangely Romanesque gold plate on the way-too-big-for the-size-of-the-room fireplace.














Despite our excitement about home renovation in general, we decided that this project was more than we were ready to tackle at this point. we genuinely hope that someone cool buys this house and does something cool with it and invites us over for a party, but it was pretty clear that we were not going to be those people.

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Log Cabin House

One of the things that we just couldn't accept in a house was vinyl siding. There were several houses that we liked a lot of things about, but whether we ever articulated it or not, I think that vinyl siding was a dealbreaker. One of the houses that we looked at was especially strange, as like in so many other houses we saw they had covered up the entire outside with vinyl, yet on the inside they had stripped away the walls to expose the logs in the structure of the house.

Cabin Exterior
Originally uploaded by galois

Cabin Interior
Originally uploaded by galois.

Of special note was the second floor, the entirety of which was a master suite. This was quite nice, especially in the way that they combined the strange log cabin walls with the boring modern design, but lost some of its charm when you realized that there were no doors separating the two floors, and in fact the master bedroom essentially opened right onto the foyer of the house as well as a child's bedroom, which also had no doors.

Cabin Master Suite
Originally uploaded by galois

I'm not sure which of the many weird things about this house were the ones that made us decide not to buy it, but it quickly got cut off the list, despite being surrounded by beautiful fruit orchards.

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Victorian House

Our final house for today was a gorgeous victorian house both inside and out. It had lots of nice features, and while it needed some work, it didn't need much more than the house we ended up buying, and certainly no more than one would expect for a house its age. The only real downside to the house itself was that the hallways were very very narrow, and that the master bedroom had a slanted floor. It was also more money than we had been planning to spend, though no more money than the house we ended up buying.

Originally uploaded by galois.

So why didn't we buy it? Well, it was on a busy street in a somewhat commercial district, but i don't think that was really the reason. The real reason is one you cannot tell from any of these photos. You see, one of the previous owners decided to pave over the entire backyard and build several large garages, one of which now houses a four-ton mechanical lift. And while I think it would be cool to own a four-ton lift, K. had a different opinion, and in the end we decided that a garden -- or even just grass and a lack of concrete -- was more important. I regret to inform you that we have no pictures of the lift, but at that point we didn't realize that someday we would be blogging about this whole endeavor.

This is just the tip of the iceberg, folks. Stay tuned for more duds.