Friday, May 01, 2009

More House Pictures

Hola. A few folks have been asking for more pictures of the casa. So, voila! I aim to please. Actually, these are pictures from the realtor's website since we still have so many unopened boxes, piles of unassembled furniture and Costco packages that the house isn't nearly ready for its photographic debut. My apologies.
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A quick note: Casa=House. For some reason, I can't help but call a house a casa. You can blame this directly on my three housemates from junior year of college who had just spent a semester in Sevilla, Spain. Things quickly morphed from normal, english nouns and adjectives to their spanish (with funny sounding accents from Spain) translations. Hence the term casa. Thank you Pete, Linds, and Nate. We'll think up a proper name for the house eventually but for now we call it the casa or The Brick House. Not very original, eh? Regardless, now that we've got that cleared up, let's move on to the pictures.
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First up: The front of the house. The house is a fair ways off the street on a gentle hill. Frankly, the hill didn't seem so gentle at 7 AM this morning when I was hauling the garbage and recycle cans down to the street. At one point the garage can decided that I was moving too slowly and made a wild break down the slope, throwing bags of detritus in its wake. I was not amused. Anyway, this is the front of the house. The garage is on the right, the deck on top. Our living room is on the right hand side (looking over the porch). The dining room is on the left. Bedrooms are on the upper floor. The living room. We're thrilled about the lovely ceilings and big windows. Not so much about the nice puce-colored tiles around the fire place. The lovely kitchen. It's heavenly. Our Santa Ana house had a teeny tiny kitchen with an ancient dishwasher (the kind you manually hook to the sink) and a dearth of counter space. This one is giant. True, it could use a little updating but I'm not complaining. What era would you say it is? 1960s? 1970s?
This is one of the aspects of the house of which we're most appreciative: the view (minus the telephone pole). Here is a shot looking east at the lovely Lake Washington. On a clear day, the Cascade Mountains can be spied in the background. The backyard. Take a detailed look at the lovely patch of ivy on the left hand side of the photo. It will soon be transformed into a fantastic chicken coop and garden shed. According to the previous owners, this was the site of a former greenhouse. Katherine and I spent a long time battling the ivy and it now looks completely different. More on that in a few days. I'd also like to stick a vegetable garden in here; hopefully we'll have enough light. Eh. This is a bathroom. Not very interesting except this happens to be our only functioning toilet at the moment (unless one wants to brave the exposed potty in the basement) since the upstairs one is current decommissioned.
This is why I'm not posting many current pictures. This was our dining room a couple days ago. Not very visually pleasing, eh? We're slowing working on it, I promise.