OK, I've been tasked (and if you know Nancy you know what I mean...) with putting some pictures of the house we're attempting to purchase up online. Now before I do that I need to bore you all with a little preamble because I haven't bored you all in quite some time. The past several months you've been being entertained by the lovely and witty wife of mine who's always coming up with new and exciting stories to tell. I'm witty too but most of the time I only amuse myself (Nancy will attest), ok so I guess this is the preamble to the preamble.

The official preamble begins now. First I'll start with a simple statement. House hunting is fun. People open up their homes and you get to peek inside, you get to open their closets (making sure you don't cause an avalanche), look in their basements (at all the unused exercise equipment), scrutinize their decorating style or lack there of (I mean really people, some colors are better off left in the can). What you see is sometimes pleasant, sometimes inspirational, sometimes puzzling, sometimes scary. All of these things can distract you from what you really should be looking at, the house itself.

Back to my statement. House hunting is fun. For the first 20 houses or so. Ok maybe 40...hmm.

I really should count how many houses I looked at but I'll just ballpark it at around 120 or so. Yeah I know. According to HGTV the average home buyer looks at 15 homes before they buy. (I always knew I was above average but I never knew how much above) See? There's that wit again...

As you all know, Nancy came out last week with a mission. Find us a house. Like the trooper she is, she was relentless in her pursuit. Together we looked at 22 houses the first day after her arrival, these were what we'll kindly call fixer-uppers. At the end of the day we saw two houses in Highlands Ranch, the newest suburb, that we really liked (oddly not fixer-uppers). From that point on, every other house we looked at was being compared to those two houses. Now its nice to have a house to compare against others since many of them are very similar to each other. We spent the next 4 days investigating homes in this area and we knew what we were looking for so well at that point that some houses we only had to open the front door, look inside and say to our Agent, "nope, not what we want, next!" and we'd move on.

Nancy and I went to Mortons Steak House that first night and enjoyed steak and wine. We had the place all to our selves which is highly unusual. Anywho it was during this dinner that Nancy complimented me on my skill at arranging the timing of the homes we saw. I had strategically and artfully told our agent to start with the lower priced homes and then move up in our price range so that Nancy could appreciate what "x" dollars buys in the area. My miserly ways have, over the years, apparently worn off on Nancy more effectively than I could have ever hoped. Almost too well I might add, seems she's torn between staying in a tent or staying in a nice relatively newer home. I haven't told her this yet but I fully intend to do a little of both! Maybe that will soothe her.

Anywho, redux, I wasn't quite sure how to take this seemingly accusatory remark. Did I manipulate her somehow by showing her houses in a certain order? Even when I hadn't seen most of these houses myself? Would it have been better to look at the more expensive homes first then work our way down to the tents? We'll never know, maybe next time we look for a house I'll have to consider these questions again.

Deciding what you like in a house takes some thought. As with many other things, sometimes in order to discover what you like you first have to rule out the things you know you don't like. We don't like traditional homes with closed off rooms and lots of walls, we don't like split level homes with stairs up and down all over the house (I could go on for days about split levels but I'll spare you, I can almost hear the collective sighs). We don't like being able to wave to our neighbors inside their house from inside our house. We don't like low ceilings. We don't like shag carpets, especially army green, puce or orange. We don't care much for panelling (sorry mom and dad). We don't like being able to flip our neighbors burgers on his grill on his back deck from our yard or vice versa. We don't like yards without at least one tree. We don't like the washer and dryer in the kitchen in a closet where the pantry should be. Well, you get the picture...and now we do too.

OK, so I've been tasked with putting pictures up so I will before it gets too late. I'll have to post a post-amble later. I'm going to be selective about the ones I put up because some look like those pictures where they are trying to capture an image of bigfoot, all blurry and shaky. Others may be a little dark but we'll replace them with better pics later when (if) we're in.

Here it is, 3165 sf above ground and 2073 sf unfinished in the basement.

Upon entering we were impressed with the high ceilings and very open concept floorplan as well as some of the contemporary art niches. The windows and arches give this a very light and airy feel.

The living room is to the right of the entry way and although it is open to the rest of the space, it has a distinctly seperate feel to it possibly due to the stairs that come down into the middle of the open space.

Here's a good shot of the stairs, with a few pedestal places for some of our newly acquired art.

At the top is a loft area with a sky light that might be a perfect little reading nook.

The kitchen is to the left, just beyond the formal dining area. Beautiful granite countertops make it really stand out. The blue walls are a bit bright and might need to be toned down a tad. But with double ovens and loads of room its the perfect entertaining kitchen since that's where everyone always seems to end up.

Here's a better shot of the whole kitchen area from the breakfast nook. You can see the entry way door through the kitchen door and the stairway through the archway into the great room. It's all very open which appeals to both Nancy and I.

A shot of the great room taken from the arch into the kitchen. The gas fireplace is a nice feature and I look forward to it next winter.

Main floor laundry is always a plus. In fact its fairly standard here in Colorado for it to be on the main floor. Beats going to the basement. Actually one of the nice things about this house is that everything we need is on the main floor including the master bedroom. The laundry is located to the left of the entrance from the garage across from the basement door which is behind the staircase.

A shot of the main entry door from the loft. Living room on the left of the pic.

Dining room on the right of the entry.

Great room to the right of that and you can see the kitchen breakfast nook table through the arch.

One of the upstairs bedrooms. It's not yellow yet Wendy but it will be by the time you visit!

Upstairs bath and it also has a skylight.

One of the other bedrooms, no idea what color this might end up, yellows already taken, any other requests?

Side yard from the front of the house.

Back deck needs some TLC and a new hottub. The door you see is access to the master bedroom and there's another slider to the deck from the breakfast nook in the kitchen.

Stone path up into the tiered garden area. The house backs to the trail system so we have access to miles of trail from our back yard and plenty of privacy.

Hot tub is in rough shape, no water, doubt its been used by the current owners. Have to replace it with a newer model. We have missed our old one since being in egypt.

Another shot of the deck out back. The arbor thingie is newer and you can see the door into the kitchen nook.

And here's the last one, a shot of the back yard. Huge huh? The whole lot is only .29 acres but believe it or not its twice the size of the average lot here. Well that concludes our tour. We're very excited about the possibilities of our (hopefully) future home. Nancy plans to try her hand at some interior design work and also helping me finish the basement. My guess is it should keep us busy for a little while. One last thing. Thanks for letting us share our lives with you through this blog over the past couple years and for your continued support and understanding. All of you who read this regularly (and even those of you who don't) mean alot to us and we're thankful for having such great friends and family to share our adventures with.