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Monday, March 3, 2008
Saturday, March 1, 2008
Wednesday, February 27, 2008
Rosewood Pictures, 1
These pictures are mostly smaller details of the house - the larger views of each room are on that circlepix website from the first post about the house.
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Snowy porch
I'm very pleased with the little details in the kitchen!
Stairs down to the full basement! Washer and dryer, huge amounts of storage space, and enough room for my absolute favorite past-time (hint: I will finally be able to perfect my spin!).
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Snowy porch
I'm very pleased with the little details in the kitchen!
Stairs down to the full basement! Washer and dryer, huge amounts of storage space, and enough room for my absolute favorite past-time (hint: I will finally be able to perfect my spin!).
Rosewood Pictures, 2
Pretty porch light, pretty blue ceiling.
Views from the front yard. It's not exactly the most precious tree-lined Ann Arbor street with perfect houses, but I like it.
Blue door going inside from the porch.
Rosewood Pictures, 3
You can get a sense of most of the downstairs layout from this view, taken in the living room. To the right, the open arch leads into the dining room, then into the kitchen. To the left is a hallway, which the bathroom and downstairs bedroom come off of.
The door to the upstairs. I think we're going to remove the door since we're going to be constantly going up and down and don't have to worry about things like a sleeping baby upstairs, which I think may be why they kept the door there? I think it would be a disaster if we kept it, a disaster involving many cats and dogs getting trapped somewhere they don't want to be...
The downstairs bathroom is in really excellent shape. Nothing to change really, except maybe little things like I'm not into the shelf/towel rack combination they have.
White stairs going up.
One view from the top of the stairs, going into what is going to be my office.
Rosewood Pictures, 4
There are these funny back stairs going down from the second floor! A little weird, but they look cool and light and old and creaky.
Two of the windows in the bedroom.
View of the upstairs bathroom. Pretty window, and that white cabinet opens up and has HUGE shelves going into the wall.
Tuesday, February 26, 2008
Rosewood
We bought a house!
It is on Rosewood Street, south of Burns Park, in Ann Arbor. Jake and his parents put in a bid Monday afternoon, and the sellers accepted it a few hours later. We'll take possession of it on June 24. Yesterday morning they went back so Jake could take lots of photographs and measurements, so that we can start planning. It has been snowing in Michigan and it sounds like it's really pretty right now. Much prettier than rainy Stockholm, which along with all southern Sweden seems to have officially reached the criteria for spring without having a season that fulfilled the criteria for winter. More on the Swedish winter later. The point is that it is white and snowy at our new home.
Our house has three bedrooms, two bathrooms, a side porch, and it was built in 1930. There are pictures here, and I'll put up some of the ones Jake took when I get them.
It was very interesting to go through this process from afar, and it sounds like once they actually saw a lot of the houses, things were very clear. Like - the farmhouse of my dreams was actually in disgusting shape except for the handful of very clever angles they photographed and would have needed hundreds of thousands of dollars of work. And - oh, this house is really exquisite but the bedrooms are tiny and even though it's only mildly out of the price range the taxes/maintenance would be ten thousand dollars more a year. Or, very simply, this house is truly disgusting and next to horrible slummy student multi-unit buildings and has about .001% of the cute bungalow look that they managed to convey in the online listing.
So, when they saw our house on Rosewood, it all made a lot of sense. It is in exquisite shape, with everything from a newly renovated kitchen to a new furnace, not a single crack in the paint on the walls, new energy efficient winterized windows, etc. The listing price was insanely good, and means that we can do some work on little things that will make a huge difference. We're going to extend their cute white picket fence so that it encloses the front of the house too, up to the sidewalk. And my favorite part is that we're going to enclose the other part of the yard that's next to the garage and sort of non-continguous with the rest of the yard - and put in raised beds for a vegetable garden! This is what I want it to look like, on a slightly smaller scale.
Apparently the closet in the master bedroom is nasty. It's a walk-in closet although it has sloped roofs which Jake has to crouch down to avoid, but everyone agreed that it would be easy to finish it nicely. The upstairs (yellow) bathroom has unfortunate plastic walls in the shower (the bigger bathroom with full tub, etc., is downstairs) and everyone also agreed it would be easy to redo that with pretty tiles or corian.
Now I'm already onto things like wallpaper! I love Farrow & Ball. I love their
yellow bumble bee wallpaper and also
this more flowery one. Jake and I have been negotiating who gets which of the other two bedrooms for desk/office space. I desperately want the upstairs bedroom that is currently blue and white, because it's such a cute attic-like space and faces right onto Rosewood, but the downstairs bedroom is going to be the primary guest bedroom because it's pretty big.
When they went back yesterday after the bid was accepted, they met the woman, who was on her way out the door with the two kids. Her husband is just finishing his residency in pediatric oncology or radiology or something, and they're moving to Kentucky because Michigan didn't make him a good enough offer to stay. Apparently she was totally tearing up - both happy that it had sold and sad to be leaving because they love it so much, so I thought that was an excellent sign.
It is on Rosewood Street, south of Burns Park, in Ann Arbor. Jake and his parents put in a bid Monday afternoon, and the sellers accepted it a few hours later. We'll take possession of it on June 24. Yesterday morning they went back so Jake could take lots of photographs and measurements, so that we can start planning. It has been snowing in Michigan and it sounds like it's really pretty right now. Much prettier than rainy Stockholm, which along with all southern Sweden seems to have officially reached the criteria for spring without having a season that fulfilled the criteria for winter. More on the Swedish winter later. The point is that it is white and snowy at our new home.
Our house has three bedrooms, two bathrooms, a side porch, and it was built in 1930. There are pictures here, and I'll put up some of the ones Jake took when I get them.
It was very interesting to go through this process from afar, and it sounds like once they actually saw a lot of the houses, things were very clear. Like - the farmhouse of my dreams was actually in disgusting shape except for the handful of very clever angles they photographed and would have needed hundreds of thousands of dollars of work. And - oh, this house is really exquisite but the bedrooms are tiny and even though it's only mildly out of the price range the taxes/maintenance would be ten thousand dollars more a year. Or, very simply, this house is truly disgusting and next to horrible slummy student multi-unit buildings and has about .001% of the cute bungalow look that they managed to convey in the online listing.
So, when they saw our house on Rosewood, it all made a lot of sense. It is in exquisite shape, with everything from a newly renovated kitchen to a new furnace, not a single crack in the paint on the walls, new energy efficient winterized windows, etc. The listing price was insanely good, and means that we can do some work on little things that will make a huge difference. We're going to extend their cute white picket fence so that it encloses the front of the house too, up to the sidewalk. And my favorite part is that we're going to enclose the other part of the yard that's next to the garage and sort of non-continguous with the rest of the yard - and put in raised beds for a vegetable garden! This is what I want it to look like, on a slightly smaller scale.
Apparently the closet in the master bedroom is nasty. It's a walk-in closet although it has sloped roofs which Jake has to crouch down to avoid, but everyone agreed that it would be easy to finish it nicely. The upstairs (yellow) bathroom has unfortunate plastic walls in the shower (the bigger bathroom with full tub, etc., is downstairs) and everyone also agreed it would be easy to redo that with pretty tiles or corian.
Now I'm already onto things like wallpaper! I love Farrow & Ball. I love their
yellow bumble bee wallpaper and also
this more flowery one. Jake and I have been negotiating who gets which of the other two bedrooms for desk/office space. I desperately want the upstairs bedroom that is currently blue and white, because it's such a cute attic-like space and faces right onto Rosewood, but the downstairs bedroom is going to be the primary guest bedroom because it's pretty big.
When they went back yesterday after the bid was accepted, they met the woman, who was on her way out the door with the two kids. Her husband is just finishing his residency in pediatric oncology or radiology or something, and they're moving to Kentucky because Michigan didn't make him a good enough offer to stay. Apparently she was totally tearing up - both happy that it had sold and sad to be leaving because they love it so much, so I thought that was an excellent sign.
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