Our First Home...in Santa Clara

Christmas 2002 was our biggest adventure yet in lights.  We have high hopes of upping the ante year by year...but for now we'll be hanging tight until the after Christmas-day sales...

Click Here- To see our 2001 Vegetable Garden:  Better yet, come by and share some of our bounty.

Probably the first thing we show people in our house is our kitchen. That's because we spent about 5 months to remodel it, doing about 99% of the work ourselves.  We gutted it, and ate with a campstove in the other room. We have new electrical, lighting, heating/ducting, windows, insulation, sheetrock, flooring, plumbing, and yes, new cabinets.  We even had fun tiling the backsplash over the granite countertops.  We enjoy many a fine meal in here.  Here Jean is, about 2 weeks before Fiona was born, making a little breakfast.  CLICK HERE TO SEE REMODEL PICS.
jean cooking-small

This is our living room...or a corner of it. Originally there was carpet, which of course came out.  Also wood paneling came down and with a little sheetrock work, we had beatiful walls again.
living room

We ripped out some windows and replaced them with what we call our "danadoors"  Danadoors because when we bought the house, our friend dana carlson was walking around the house and she said, "man, sure would be nice to have french doors here".  Well, it was an idea that kicked off a 6-week project...  CLICK HERE TO SEE REMODEL PICS .
final_doors

One thing Phil has really gotten into since moving into our new house is spending painstaking hours in the garage going for his Norm Abrams imatation. Although far from perfection, several custom woodworking projects have resulted.   CLICK HERE TO SEE WoodWorking PICS.

Note the new crown and baseboard that became a requirement before moving the bed into the room. We had fun doing that as well as new paint and new carpet (ok, new fixtures, electrical outlets, and...well, that's all we could think to replace!)

In anticipation of our 2nd child, we kicked off a bathroom remodel for the middle bathroom.  Starting in December of 2002, we aimed to be done by July of 2003.  Of course...the goal was to do as much of it by ourselves (or whatever friends we could con into coming over for the cost of a Corona!). We actually wrapped up the last stripe of paint 3 days after Mia was born.

In August of 2003 Jean and I picked up our first rental property.  The idea was to see if we could pick up some real estate both as an investment and a hobby.  We are targeting property up in the Sacramento area and managing it ourself.  Click below for some pics plus a list of our favorite links (boring reading for those not into real estate!)