Heh. We had 11″ of snow here three weeks ago. Not that you can tell now, though…
As for the house, we really sort of lucked into it. We had wandered through it in a half-finished state (before even the sheetrock was up) while we were looking around at different houses and found ourselves in the embarassing situation of walking through someone’s house while the owner is present. The owner was a woman who was having the house built to spec, with lots of upgrades (like the fireplace) and the bookshelves in the master bedroom. She gave us a tour of the whole place and described all the nice things about it.
Two months later, we had just missed out on a bid on a house down the block. Takaza was looking around at different possibilities and decided to stop by again. He found out that the woman had been unable to sell her old house and thus couldn’t buy the spiffy new house she’d shown us through, and that the house was now available. We snapped it up – I don’t think it even technically hit the market before we put in a bid on it 🙂
The placement of the fireplace in the living room is neat, but I don’t much like the alcove over it, which is wired specifically for a television. In combination with the flames below, it makes me think of an altar to the TV God. We put the TV to the left of the fireplace and filled the alcove with silk plants.