Getting To Know You

I'm sure you're all sick of the blah-blah-blah posts and want more of the PICTURES ALREADY posts.  So without further ado, let me give you the grand tour of Little Pink House III (starting with the exterior today) ...

This is the front:



You can't see much of it.  Whoever owned it before this just let it grow wild.  Trees, shrubs, self-seeding junk trees/bushes, and weeds were all left to run amok.  (Is that really how you spell that??)  The grass was left to die completely.  The pond in the water feature out back is so covered with algae that Daphne thought it was grass and tried to walk across it!  She fell in up to her knees in swamp water. Nary a basement window can be seen through the jungle of bushes.  The house has huge 2-story picture windows in the living room that "look out" onto the back yard, but really just look out onto bushes.  So here is a picture we found on the county website of the house when it was first built...

This house is VERY 1990's.   It's peach colored stucco with some brick, it has those arched windows that were completely the rage in the late 80's to late 90's.  The shape is very what I call "90's behemoth" like a bear hunching over with its face low to the ground and it's giant back all that's visible.  You can't really tell in these pictures because they're all taken from street level looking uphill.  But this digital picture will show you what I mean...

The backyard has serious potential.  It is not huge, but it is good-sized.  It has some trees on it--a few fruit trees and some other unidentified small trees. It has a flat wide area just behind the house with a patio made of two un-matching materials, and a rock waterfall that feeds into a swamp that will one day be a lovely koi pond.  And then it slopes up about 8-9 feet with a small plateau at the top, enough for a few more trees.  And there's a gate that leads directly out onto a running trail!  Behind that, just woods.  And two or three house lengths down, a park.  So no backyard neighbors, woot! 

 

 

(Rock waterfall and pond area)

 

 

One final exterior feature that should be mentioned is the Land of Desolation out behind the master bedroom. It currently looks like this...

 

 

We suspect there use to be a patio here.  The 2 steps leading down to this area are sunken and cracked, so probably whatever was here was sunken and cracked too and got ripped out.  Someday we hope to make it a nice deck with a hot tub built in.  Right off the master bedroom?  Hell to the yes!  But probably not for a loooong time.

 

So that's the exterior.  We hate the general look of the house, but we have great plans to change it entirely.  Those are coming up in a couple of days.  What we do love is the location of the house--the neighborhood, distance to the freeway, proximity to stores/gym/school--and the fact that it's in a good neighborhood on a quiet street.  We love that it has some trees.  The yard is old enough to have a little character.  We love that it has the running trail behind and no backyard neighbors.  We love the size and space of the house.  We love that there is so much potential.  So it'll take a lot of work to whip this jungle of a yard into shape, and to reinvent the look of this house (think Craftsman meets Coastal Contemporary).  But in the end, I think we're going to love it!

 

Join me tomorrow for Part 2 of Getting To Know You: "Getting To Know All About You" (The Interior). 

 

.