Walkthrough #2 - The Bedroom Wing

As promised, a walkthrough of the other side of the house, the bedroom wing. This end is still a little up in the air and depends on if we refinish the shed for Shawn's office right away or down the road.

This is the long wood hallway of the bedroom wing:

We were tinkering with the idea of extending the windows on the left which overlook the courtyard to the ground. We thought that may expose this side of the house too much. We may still make them a little bigger. There are two skylights which give off a nice diffused light.

Third Bedroom
We decided this would be my sewing room/office since it gets the most natural light. Shawn's going to use the spare bedroom for now. I think.

My dream sewing room would consist of a middle island, possibly on wheels, to be used as a cutting table. And lots and LOTS of storage and cupboards so our young terrorist cat Benny will not drop pins, tear up pattern paper, claw fabric and otherwise wreak havoc - grrrrrr. I love my cat, I love my cat...

contemporary home office design by austin architect Paul DeGroot

Drool....

Second Bedroom

This is the middle bedroom and gets the least light. We are going to make this the guestroom eventually.

As I was typing this I suddenly had an idea for a murphy bed in this room. That way, the room could be used as a temporary office for Shawn and a guest room if we need it. Like this:
Up

modern bedroom design

...And down

modern bedroom design

Available from Bedder Way.

Second Bathroom

Suuuuuper tacky!

Check out this bodacious colour! (Gag!)

This will be gone gone gone! That color is hurting my eyes! The bathroom will be changed around so that the shower will be larger and will be at the end of the room like this:

modern bathroom design by san diego architect Architects Magnus

Master Bedroom

This is still a redesign in process. In other words, I have a million ideas still in my head! The structure will be changing in that the solarium will be taken out and the deck will be extended the length of the house. Sliding glass doors will access the deck and there will be stairs leading down to the garden. There is actually a lot of closet space that will be opened up as well.

Master Bath

Mid Century Moderns seem to favor a lot of wood panelling. Unfortunately this reminds me way too much of my parents basement. I can see keeping small portions of the wood panelling for accents, though.
The master bathroom has a stand up shower stall and a large square tub. We discovered some empty space behind the wall on the left side so the bathroom will be widened. The tub is going to be taken out to make way for a much larger shower. The toilet will be moved to a separate room towards the front. The counter will be elongated keeping the 2 sinks but adding a vanity area in the middle with a stool: Something along these lines, except I don't like the black counter:

modern bathroom design by san francisco interior designer Alisa Hofmann

Still lots to think about and decide on. I highly recommend the website Houzz.com and their app, where all of my idea photos have come from.

But be careful, it's highly addictive! I now carry my iPad everywhere looking at house porn!

The Cleanup Begins!

The mess left by cleaning up/cutting down trees, brush and plants is all over the property. I mentioned previously how difficult it is right now envisioning what it could look like. Last Sunday with a bottle of champagne and 2 glasses in hand,  we sat at our future lanai on a couple of purchased chairs from Home Depot, using a tree stump as a makeshift table and contemplated our future plans.

As mosquitoes feasted on us, we sipped champagne and watched our first sunset from our new home and thought This is going to be great!

And now the cleanup begins! A landscape crew from Bill Doughty Landscaping started work this week clearing everything out. A dumpster was brought in to aid in the process:

Bill told us he will have the grounds so cleaned up, we will be able to eat off it - we're going to hold him to that! Because the back is so sloped everything had to be gathered and carried to the front by hand. Not an easy undertaking with the amount of debris.

And this is our front courtyard, now a dumping ground for cut branches.

The great news about this is that we anticipate needing 50+ cubic yards of mulch around the property for landscaping and we will be able to reuse most of the branches that were trimmed from the trees - after chipped -  and not have to purchase any. Woohoo - money saved!

The landscaping in front is starting to be uncovered. Ivy had choked just about everything and had covered up the beautiful stone pillars lining the driveway. This shows half of the ivy pulled up.

Apparently getting rid of ivy is a long process and requires some vigilance to stop it from reappearing. Amazing that I had originally thought it was quite pretty - but then learned that it is very invasive, and also a home to hornets nests and rodents. Buh-bye!

Great news on the landscaping design front as well. We have finally found a landscape architect. (Just a side note - my biggest pet peeve is not getting a call back. Even if you are incredibly busy, and hey, in this econcomy, my hat goes off to you. But it's always good business practice to return a phone call. So Huettl Landscape Architects, you can suck it for not calling us back.)

We met with the husband and wife team of Roche + Roche, showed them the current mess of a property and what we envisioned for it. They liked our ideas and 'got' what we were looking for: keeping it as natural as much as possible and adding some sitting areas and modern touches. I love the idea of a meandering path to the different sitting areas and additions of colorful, frangrant plants that will add a splash of color to the natural grasses. Dave Roche pointed out that we can have the right angles and linear approach of some modern additions to the landscape that will be nicely offset by the natural curviness of the rock formations that are all over the property. I had never even thought of that. We are excited to have them design our outside oasis.
I'm also excited that we are going to put in a vegetable garden at the side of the house! Finally - me - a gardener! My mother will be so proud. I definitely love the idea of cooking and eating things fresh from our garden. Of course, this will require an enclosed deer proof area and some education on tending a vegetable garden.
Although they don't exactly fit in with the modern design, we both LOVE the rose bushes on the property. There are about 5 or 6 bushes, some were choked by oleanders which have been cut down. Someone put a lot of love and care into them at one point but they have been sadly neglected and forgotten for some time. Despite the neglect, they are fighters - still blooming like crazy and the fragrant scent of the blooms is intoxicating.

Judging by how old these bushes appear to be and their fighting spirit, we both think it would be a tragedy to remove them.

Oh, the carnage...

The Britton Tree Services crew spent all week cutting, thinning and tending to all of the oaks, jungle, and just plain crap on the property that had not been maintained in 50 years. Great job, guys! 

The property is 1.18 acres and there is landscaping in both the front and back. 

Our opened view in the front of the house looking towards the Coombsville valley - which has just gotten it's own AVA. It's incredible having a house with 2 personalities. When you are in the front, total quiet and you feel like you are in the country. Sitting in the back, you get the city feel overlooking Napa.



The back is a fairly steep slope that ends at a 40 ft. cliff - with the incredible views. 



All the way to Mt. Tam and beyond. We could see the Sutro tower yesterday. Time to buy a telescope!

The cut down tree carnage in front of the storage shed



The cut trees and branches all over the back of the house

This will be one of the sitting areas in the back of the house. The concrete had to be dug up around the 2 oaks as it was choking them.

As we cut through the jungle and explored the slope in the back, we are discovering all of these great hidden, overgrown areas with lava rock popping up throughout. It made me recall one of my favorite books when I was a child - The Secret Garden!

We plan to keep everything natural but put in a meandering stone/gravel path throughout the slope to 3 different sitting areas. Luckily, we only had to chop 3 oaks down. Punching holes in the oaks and creating canopies really opened up a lot of our views. At this point, though it's a little hard to envision the landscaping with the mess!  A landscape crew will be coming next week and cleaning up.

Walkthrough # 1

Now that the house is empty, I did a walkthrough of the entire house and took photos of each room. It's a lot easier now to visualize how the house could look without any furniture in it. Guy, our architect has drawn up the house plan as is and I simplified it for viewing here:

The Courtyard

With the large windows, you can see through to the other side of the house and we plan to keep this look. Planning to take all the concrete out in the courtyard, and replace it with gravel and concrete stones throughout, with a sitting area around a fire pit.

This is the Quince home that Guy remodeled in Sunnyvale, the landscape architect was Bernard Trainor.



Dream courtyard look

Quite dreamy, isn't it?

Front door and Great Room

The exposed red brick isn't doing it for us. We may plaster over it and create a more contemporary look with some type of metal finish around the fireplace. 

 

This is going to be an interesting challenge as we plan to take down the wall to the kitchen and create a larger, more open kitchen. The challenge with an even large great room is how do we break it up. The middle partition thingy (really don't know what to call that ) that you see by the front door will be moved. Shawn wants to get rid of it completely but I still think we need it somewhere. Planning to move the front door up and possibly raise the roof a foot. The single pane windows will all be replaced by double pane windows and will be floor to ceiling, increasing our view.

Currently the great room has no access to the outside (?!?!) This creates one stuffy situation (trust me on this one!). Our whole goal with this house, and what a lot of Eichler style modern ranches were created for was bringing the outside in. It seems that there were sliding doors to the deck on the far right in the last photo. Perhaps they rotted or cracked and were replaced by just windows.

Atrium



Again, no access to the outside front courtyard. Planning to take out this atrium, replace these single panes with sliding or folding glass dors and create a bigger hallway/traffic flow area to the bedroom wing.



Kitchen



Far wall to be taken down, configuration to be completely changed. Large island/counter with seating for casual dining. We very rarely have a formal dinner so this will be our main eating area. We both love to cook so all appliances will be replaced and more of a chefs kitchen created.

Garage

This was filled to the brim with the previous tenant. Now emptied out, it easily fits 2 cars. This is the only area I did not take a photo of yet!

To be continued....