the floorplan i fell in love with

Here is an image of the floorplan. Not much has changed from the existing house from 1972. Here is a list of the items that I changed:

1. master bathroom - made it larger with a separate water closet, double sink, steeping tub, steam shower and skylight.


2. kitchen/dining room - knocked down wall between. made window at kitchen sink larger. added window in dining room. added pantry.


3. living room - added a 27' long sliding glass door into courtyard.


4. second bath - turned two bathrooms between bedroom 2 and 3 into a single jack-n-jill bathroom.


5. playroom - added windows and increased size of existing windows.


6. garage - added third car bay and changed from double garage door to three single car garage doors.


7. carport - added carport to address issue of distance between garage and kitchen.

pool in the courtyard

One of the things that attracted us to this house is the pool in the middle of the courtyard surrounded by the house. For some reason the idea of having a completely private pool in the middle of the house was really intriquing to me. One of the problems however, with the existing pool was that it was raised up about 24" above grade and therefore killed much of the space of the courtyard. Once we realized that the plumbing was all bad and the plaster would need to be replaced, we made the decision to replace the pool completely. After much debate we decided to keep the "new" pool in the old location. Part of the thinking here is that if we did so, the cost would be less because the hole would already be partially existing. This thinking proved to be false. The pool cost every bit as much as a fresh new pool with a fresh new hole. Still not sure why or how this is, but it is. Above is a sequence of photos that show the progression of the pool up to today. As of this evening the new tile has been placed at the edges of the pool and around the hot tub. This is an exciting event simply because the pool has been in a stagnant state for quite some time and now we are seeing some movement.

pinkHAUS found

We found this house after a year or so of casually looking in the area for a house to buy and POSSIBLY fix up if necessary. Well, needless to say, we ended up purchasing this one with the thought that we would spend a little money and fix it up. The reason that this house appealed to us so much is that it has a great floorplan around a courtyard with a swimming pool in the middle of the house. It also sits on a full acre of land - something quite rare in Las Vegas these days.

After a lot of planning and budgeting, I drew up new floorplans, elevations, etc. to get this beast underway. The first major item was the demolition of the existing house. In hindsight it might have been easier to just bulldoze the whole thing and start from scratch, but nevertheless, we decided to keep the slab and portions of the stud walls. Here's a picture of the kitchen at the very early stage of demolition. And here's another picture of the kitchen (this side of the red pick-up) after demolition. At this point it looks like a brand new house that has recently started being framed.