Pre-Purchase

this is the house before we moved in. the yard needs work, and the stucco will have to be patched. both chimneys are losing bricks and stucco, and there is a huge, non-functioning passive water heating system on the south side of the house that will be removed.



here's the deck, above the two-car (long) garage. the arbor (trellis?) is too low, and only covers a few feet of the deck. we're planning on raising it a foot or two, and adding more beams to cover most of the deck.


the back of the house has the least amount of cracks in the stucco. all of the windows are aluminum storm windows, with the original wood windows on the inside.


this sidewalk goes around to the front of the garage. past the gate, it gets too narrow to push a wheelbarrow through, so everything has to be hauled out in boxes and buckets.


the previous owner built a bunch of trellises out of galvanized pipe. this one is over the gate to the garage. there are more covering the walkway to the front porch, and a big arch over the back porch. most of them are for grapevines (i think there are four big grapevines on the lot).



the shed (complete with a cow skull over the door). it has seen better days, and we will probably get around to tearing it down and building a new one next year.


the laurel hasn't really taken advantage of the galvanized trelliswork over the shed. also, the grass here is the only "lawn" on the entire lot.


this is the passive water heater the previous owner built long ago (i'm assuming boredom was the primary motivator). it is no longer connected to anything but the house, and we will be tearing it off.


the water heater is built over the basement walk-out, and you can see the big grapevine which covers the back porch.