We moved into our new house in mid-February (our first Phoenix place was just a rental, this one is the real deal) and I finally got around to putting the first floor plan into CAD. So here she is (with a little furniture because why not):
The house was built in 1986 in a stucco-land neighborhood in an area of Phoenix known as Ahwahtukee. From the front, this beaut is all garage:
This is not the aesthetic we were going for at all but it is next to a mountain so we overlooked it. Plus, how often does one sit at the end of one’s driveway to observe one’s house? Not often, one would imagine. Oh, how I would love to paint this house one day and put it out of its tan misery.
These images are from the Zillow listing and are even fleshier-beige than it is in real life. Realtor photos kill me. The nice thing about this house is that the main living space is very open.
The wet bar’s days are numbered. The kitchen sink is literally steps away, why do we need a mini-sink here? I have plans to wall this nook off and turn it into a proper pantry.
Another living room view with the glorious fans. This image is a little skewed, I don’t think it is showing the true size of the room. The sliders on the right go out to the patio and the backyard and cut off on the left side of the photo would be the door to the laundry room and passageway to the garage.
The breakfast nook with the octopus wrought iron light fixture. Off to the side you can see the door to the powder room that is under the stairs. We had to pry that phone off the wall and patch the hole it left ….
And … an itty bitty kitchen! That’s why I’m planning for a wet bar to pantry conversion because there is not enough room in all these cabinets for food and plates and pots and pans. Not to worry, we’ll work it all out! The wall on the other side of the fridge (not shown) is where the old-school phone was.
Here’s one corner of the backyard, the “sandbox” where the hot tub lives. JT and I visited a material yard the other day to look at some pavers. Some day soon that sand will be history just like the wet bar. The hot tub just needed a little work to get up and running and was doing great until a few weeks ago when it died. We need to call our hot tub guy up again and get it checked out. Ironically enough he lived in STL for a time and worked at Mississippi Nights back in the day. It’s a little big world.
More of the backyard and the mountain beyond, standing from the vantage point of a little out from the back patio.
And this is the whole backyard from the vantage point of the back corner where we triangle into the mountain preserve. It’s a lot of rock and it gets full, baking hot desert sun all day so we have yet to come up with a different landscape plan. At this point, we have enough ideas up our sleeves to keep us busy for a while.
So that’s the yard and first floor – I started on the CAD plan of the upstairs but I haven’t made it too far – this house is all different shapes jutting each and every way – the floor plate for the two floors doesn’t line up at all and it means more work to decipher everything. It’s a big change from our 800 SF brick bungalow that was a little more straightforward. However so far life in the desert and especially in our new house has been great for JT and me. Next weekend when we have the long weekend and some more free time I’ll take some “during” shots of our first floor as it is now!
Have a great week and happy stuffing day! Cheers – CT
Living Analog 