Our Rights!!!

I've been talking to (different) folks at the local electrical utility for three months now. Each time I learn something new, something different, sometimes something that conflicts with what I was told (or understood) earlier. Yesterday, I spoke with the legal department. I called them because no one else could answer my question of, "Can I dig in the right-of-way myself?". I was told no. I was also asked why I would want to. I said I didn't want to pay $2000 for an 80 foot trench. I was told that I have prescriptive rights and that I am not obligated to change (and pay for) my electical connection (which trespasses on the empty front lot).

Now I have to figure out how to get the builder (on the front lot) to dig/pay for the moving of my electrical connection. He speaks English well, but has a thick accent (Indian, I think) and sometimes I have difficulty understanding him. Plus, I don't think he understands me sometimes. If he had an email address, it might be easier to communicate, but he doesn't have one.

The water line is a similar situation.

We'll see how this plays out. My spouse and I might have to be annoying or confrontational in order to get everything to play out properly (read: to our advangtage).

Trenches on the brain

So, we just got back from our lovely long weekend away. I was able to sufficiently distract spouse from various rat hole problems and trench issues.

However, now that we're home (and we were actually happy to see the rat hole!), we have to begin to deal with things again. Luckily, the weather's nice today, so the rat hole is actually a comfortable temperature. Unless you're sitting still, but then you're fine with an extra shirt, so no worries.

Here's the latest development: we can't dig all of our own trenches. The one from our house up the driveway is fine. We'll actually have to dig three or four trenches alongside our driveway to the road. One for electricity, one for water (which has to be three feet away from the electricity), one for phone, and one for cable. I'm not sure if the phone and cable can go in the same trench or not. They will have to have separate conduit laid, so we'll see. Spouse knows more about that than I do.

That's all fine. We can rent a trencher for less than $500 and do the work ourselves. No worries. BUT, we found out that we're not allowed to dig our own trench from the power pole to our driveway, because it's a right of way. We'll have to hire an outside contractor for that. We've made a few calls, and it works out to be around $3000 for the trench. One trench. Yeargh. We're still making phone calls to try and see who can do it for how much. We're not licked yet.

Soon the weather will stay warmer, and then we can start ripping out walls. Whee!

Trenches & Barriers

The weather's been nice the past couple of days. It has rained on and off, but it's been sunny and warm, too. It's been wonderful! And with the warm weather comes bees down from the attic. We really will have to do something about that.

Anyway, the nice weather also means that our thoughts have turned back to the rat hole. It's time to get moving again. Last weekend the guy that owns the front lot was looking at his lot with a bunch of other folks, so it looks like they might be starting to think about doing something on that lot. I'm going to be sorry to have a big house sitting in front of ours. *sigh* Well, we'll see what happens.

We really would like to work with the builder guy, but we can't understand what he says. His accent is too thick. Stupid language barrier. Unfortunately, because we can't understand him, we can't really work in tandem with him. Oy. So, we're just going to try to get out of his way while he tears apart that lot. Thing is, our utilities cross that lot, so if he screws up, he screws us.

That means we have to get our rears in gear and dig a trench in the next couple of weeks. We know what we need to do for electric, and so we're just waiting to hear about what we need to do, water-wise. We've been hoarding our money, so we should be able to afford the trench. We're just going to rent a trencher and have at it. So, come April, we'll have our trench, our utilities will run across our property, and all will be well.

We'll see how all this REALLY goes down.

Gettin' Warmer

So, after several weeks of being freezing cold, it looks like the weather's going to start getting warmer. Thank goodness. I can't remember if we mentioned this in an earlier post or not, but we've been very, very cold in chateau rat hole. Stupid pellet shortage. If only our pellet stove was big enough to burn wood... Oh well. Thank goodness for the old, not-safe baseboards in the master bedroom and our travelling oil radiator. We've been doing a fair job of staying warm.

Anyway, we don't have any progress to report. It's the same old thing. As soon as the weather gets warmer, off come the walls and in goes the new wiring. Mwa ha ha ha. I can't wait.

We did have our first guest this weekend, though. He's a good house guest anyway, and I was surprised he actually agreed to stay in the rat hole, especially considered that the walls in the guest room are covered with nothing but a thin layer of duct tape. But he stayed, and it was fine. I guess our home is fit for human habitation after all! We have another house guest the weekend of April 1st, too, and I'm very excited. A college friend is visiting, and I haven't seen her for five years. Whee! We'll see what SHE thinks of the rat hole. *grin*

This week we get to put in some plants my spouse got from work-related stuff. It'll be fun to put them in, since the weather's supposed to be nice, and it's been a long, long time since I've played in the dirt (I don't count the trench of horrors!). It'll also be a challenge to figure out where they should go, since we're still planning on levelling the yard this summer, anyway...

But that's all we have planned. The rest is all non-house-related work. Next weekend we're going away to stay in somebody else's house. And I bet you it'll be warm.

Kitchen Cabinets

We've been thinking about our kitchen. We have laid out an option that we both agree works. We don't have a big kitchen, but as long as it works well, we don't mind.

Here are two elevations of the kitchen. The one on the top left is the north side. The one on the bottom right is the south side.

If you hadn't noticed, I'm kind of a 3D geek and I tend to make use of the tools I have access to. In fact, if I don't have a tool, I'll find one or make one. The elevations were done in Revit (as were the previous floorplans).

The images below are of a cabinet door design for the uppers. The first one on the left is a front view. The one on the right is a close-up to hopefully show a little more detail. The bottom is a section so as to show the profile. The images below were made with SketchUp (a great little 3D app that is very intuitive, highly recommended).

We will probably end up with painted doors. We both like wood, but the fact that we don't have a lot of light in the kitchen makes us lean towards a lighter color for the cabinets. My spouse isn't to keen on light woods and I'm not too sure how well lighter woods would go with the more retro feel we are trying to reference.

The two big lower panels could be glass or wood. The tiny panels on the top will be glass, and we could even put in a piece of art-glass every so often to add a little interest to the surface. I'll try to incorporate the SketchUp door with the Revit model to show everything in context later.

The profile isn't set in stone yet. This is one that we've both liked, though.

Home Show

We really slacked on the ol' posting this week. Oh well. There wasn't much time to work on the house- we both worked late, or came home and worked more. We did get our kitchen cabinets designed, though. Now we just need to decide whether or not we'll use natural wood finishing or if we'll paint them. I love the look of wood, but the kitchen is so small that I worry that it'll seem cramped and dark if we used the shades of wood I like. I don't like blonde or honey-colored woods. I just don't. But, they might look good painted, too. I'll have to see if I can get my spouse to post them later this week.

We also attended the Seattle Home Show last weekend. It was pretty good. We weren't in the market to buy anything right then and there, but we gathered tons of information. We saw tons of different kinds of windows, found out more about fireplaces, saw good lighting, saw fun doors, and got lots of information on tile, countertops, hardwood floors, millwork, etc. It was really great for idea-gathering. We wish, in retrospect, that we had taken more pictures, but oh well. That's what the showrooms are for, I suppose. Now we just have to find the time to do it.

I think our next part of the project will be to replace the cold water plumbing. That means we'll have to run it to more places, though, like the toilets, than we're currently running it to. Since it's been so cold, we've put off cutting even more holes in our walls. Hopefully we'll be able to get to cracking on that in the next couple of weeks, though.

I want to just skip right ahead to the kitchen. Shame on me.

Inspiring Pictures

As mentioned earlier, we visited a tile showroom. There were so many beautiful tiles and patterns. Here are just a few that I photographed. We definitely liked the small tiles and are leaning heavily towards small hexagons or rounds for the bathroom.
































































Small tiles satisfy the OCD in my spouse and I (both for eye candy but especailly for installaion obsessiveness).

We also stopped by Restoration Hardware and a couple of other showrooms. While I'm not sure we'd buy from RH, it was great to browse through their showroom.

This hardware set had the best feeling handles/pulls. We really like the flare in the middle. I've seen some pulls that are a little more exagerated in the middle and they feel even better.







My spouse didn't like the ellipitcal knobs (neither did I), but we did like the round knobs in this set.









While we don't like chrome in the kitchen, these pulls could be nice.










This bathroom set was nice, and the lights adjusted! How fun is that! The escutcheons are rectangular instead of round which is a nice change of pace.







My spouse really liked the porcelain switch plates. She's found a bunch of other switch plates (in art nouveau styles) that are great, too.








We loved this door hardware. Stone River Bronze makes some amazing stuff! Rocky Mountian Hardware makes some great stuff, too. But they're a little out of our price range.

Big ideas

We spent the weekend gathering data. We're waiting for the weather to dry out and warm up a bit before we start doing the rewiring, and we're going to do more plumbing in March. We're also still doing research on which sawzall we want to buy, and until we purchase one we can't really remove any of the old pipes.

Once we get the rewire done and the walls in place, it'll be time to start making the inside of the house nice. We're going to put in some simple crown molding and decide on other architectural details. So, we went around to a bunch of places trying to figure out what exactly we like and what we want. We visited a Kohler showroom, IKEA, a kitchen showroom, and a tile store, not to mention ReStore over in Ballard. ReStore gathers stuff out of old houses and resells it, like sinks, windows, doors, doorknobs, grates, cabinets, you name it. There's all sorts of great antique and vintage stuff there, and it's reasonably priced. It's a great way to recycle a lot of building materials. We'll keep it in mind for later.

We also stopped by Restoration Hardware and Pottery Barn. It was great to look at a lot of different types of cabinet and bathroom hardware. The feel of drawer pulls and knobs is really important, and we found some nice stuff. At Pottery Barn we bought a pair of really nice Tibetan-style stools, courtesy of a generous gift certificate from my aunt and a supplemental one from a good friend. The stools are our first furniture purchase for our new home, and they've already come in handy, since there's no couch to sit on, let alone chairs. ^_^

On the way home, we swung by Barnes & Noble and used yet another gift certificate to purchase tons of home improvement magazines. So far we've seen some pretty interesting stuff. The best purchase of all, though, was something called the "Old House Interiors Design Center Sourcebook." It's basically a list of websites and companies that manufacture period-style home stuff, like tiles, wallpaper, door hardware, etc. It's wonderful and amazing, and if we can afford anything we find in there, we're going to get it.

Next weekend it's off to the Home Show, where we'll spend all weekend getting our head filled with really great ideas. That's what we're hoping, at least.

New (Floor) Plan

Here is a new floor plan based on the fact that we can build in the SE corner. We've moved the fireplace, too. Have to consult a contractor on how feasible the fireplace is, though.

For those of you who remember the post about the corroded hot water pipes, here is a picture of one of the worst. Solid corrosion. Almost no room for water to pass through.

And here is a picture of our vintage exhaust fan in the full bathroom. It's on a timer and there is a little bit of startup time (about 5-10 seconds) as it winds up. It's actually not even attached (up in the attic space). It just sits there. No screws attaching in to a truss. I'll have to do something about that someday.

Room

Today we found out from city hall that we can build as close as five feet from the property line. The property line is basically the fence the put up right in front of what used to be the front door. The distance from the fence to the side of our house is five feet.

Big deal, you might say. What this means, though, is that we can actually add on a third bedroom. We were originally going to put a deck there (and I think it would have been a lovely place for a deck), but a third bedroom will add resale value to our house as well as allow us to live here longer. If we have a bedroom for each kid, there's really no limit to how long we can stay. So, that'd be a pretty nice thing to do. They're going to be pouring foundation on the front lot, anyway- it might not be hard for us to go in on it with the builder, or at least his crew. Who knows. They'll be here already, after all, and there's something to be said for under the table...

At the very least, it gives us something to chew on until it's warm and dry enough to rip off the walls and actually begin the rewiring.

Dough-a-go-go

We were talking tonight, and we realized that we never really talked about whether or not we got our money back.

Well, we did. We almost didn't. Somebody (the loan people) didn't do the paperwork right and forgot to make sure the funds would be released to us and not back to the seller. Ugh. It took a bit, but we did get our money back. What's really scary is that it's already half gone. We haven't even started to rewire anything yet or do the new drywall, and the money's already half gone. Oy. House stuff is REALLY expensive. Of course, the electrician himself was $3K. That was a quarter of our money right there. Now I'm wondering how the heck we're ever going to manage to do some of the things we want to do. We'll probably be able to do the rewiring, and the new walls, and maybe put in bamboo floors, and then we'll be about out of cash. We won't have even started on the kitchen... Well, we'll figure it out. Here's to hoping for good raises.

Now we just have to go buy a sawzall and the rest of the pex for the cold water plumbing, as I think I mentioned before. Whee. That might happen this week. First order of business is to sweep all the stuff off of our roof. We had a big wind storm here over the weekend, and I think half the forest is on our roof. Okay, so the big, beautiful cedars on the front lot kept us out of the worst of the wind, but there's still a lot of stuff up there. They make special roof-sweeping brooms. We're going to buy one of those. It's supposed to be sunny the whole week (miracle of miracles!), so we have some time.

Safety First

Or, in our case, eventually. No, we actually put up our smoke detectors and carbon monoxide detector. We won't be dying of fire anytime soon, hopefully. Actually, it was an extremely unpleasant task, for being such a simple one. First, we discovered that every single ceiling we tried to fasten a detector to was different. One was wood, one was wallboard, and one was plain ol' drywall. We fastened one to a beam. The same beam, actually, as the ceiling fan o' death that nearly claimed the noggin of my brother (several times). We've also fastened our makeshift ceiling light to that beam as well. Thank goodness for old Ikea paper lanterns. The light it casts is beastly, in my opinion, but it does the trick until we can redo the ceiling and put in recessed lighting.

Anyway, what made the whole detector experience horrible was that it was a throwback to our run-ins with fire alarms at the old apartment (which we shall call, for now, "heaven," as it was clean, comfortable, had heat, and wasn't in danger of flooding). Some of you know this, but the system was hard-wired and made the most god-awful noise. It would have awoken us from a dead slumber. In fact, on our last night there, it did. Horrible. Long story short, we're now really, really sensitive to noises like that. The detectors, of course, needed batteries, but when you put the batteries in, it makes the alarm noise. Several times. As soon as you connect. I literally couldn't hold on to the detector the first time it happened- the noise upset me so much I nearly ran. So, the installation was basically an hour of us having our wits shattered by ear-splitting noises. It was lovely. We got over it. Sort of.

Thing is, we suspect that we would be fine here even if there was a fire or carbon monoxide leak (the only possible source of carbon monoxide in the Rat Hole would be the pellet stove, since there's no natural gas or forced air or anything here). The Rat Hole is so drafty the carbon monoxide or the smoke would probably just drift right out.

We also got our security deposit and half month's rent from the old apartment this week. It's nice to have- now we can buy pex to redo the cold water plumbing and maybe buy that sawzall we've had our eyes on.

Bee Mine

We still haven't managed to install the smoke detectors. Shame on us. Oh well! They came with batteries, but the batteries aren't pre-installed, so we don't have to worry about them going off in their packages. We both ended up working on freelance projects last night, so work on the Rat Hole wasn't going to be happening.

After much work on our floor plan, we decided that we're going to try to squeeze in a third bedroom where the deck is in the drawings in the previous post. We just have to find out if the city will let us. We might do it anyway and just pay a fine. *shrug*

We've also discovered that our home isn't the Rat Hole, its the Hornet Hole. Okay, so it's not really that bad. We've only encountered three hornets. Big hornets, actually. But still only three of them. And one was dead. Anyway, hornets aren't so bad, really, especially when it's still cold outside and they're slow and stupid, but we've found enough of them now that we're pretty sure there's a nest in our attic. That's no surprise- we saw the remains of one nest, and lots of folks have hornet nests in their attics. The problem is that we need to be up in the attic quite a bit over the next year. We have to get rid of all the crappy insulation because we need to replace the ceilings (and the insulation, so it works out), not to mention run the wiring and the plumbing through the attic space. Working up there with a swarm of hornets ranks highly in the "not very fun or intelligent" category. So, we need to try to find their nest and get them out of there while they're still cold and slow and stupid.

Wish us luck. ^_^

Slow Going

We fully intended to have our smoke detectors installed by now. It just hasn't happened. The sack of detectors has been lying on the floor since the weekend. We've talked about doing it the past several nights in a row, but we've either eaten dinner too late, become caught up in other chores, been too tired, or been distracted.

That's not to say that we haven't done anything at all. It's just that we haven't done anything to the house as it exists right now.

So what, exactly, have we been doing with our time? Why, planning for the future. The reality of the situation is that our floor plan is funky, and the house is small. I, personally, hate the bathrooms. We also know that we're not going to be here forever, so making improvements that will increase the value of the home is in our best interests. Luckily we have this nice little software package that lets us take our floor plan and move stuff around. Walls vanish or appear, windows get moved, and all manner of furniture and appliances are added. We've been using this software to figure out what we want our house to look like when we're done with it. This is what we're starting with:












There's a lot of room there, but it isn't used to the utmost. We think we can do better, which is how we came up with this plan.












The only problem is that we're not sure we'll be able to afford those changes. We're trying to come up with a plan, but who knows if it'll be feasible or not. We're also trying to figure out ways to add a third bedroom, or maximize what we have now without enclosing the car port. Turns out that it's tedious work, and yet we manage to spend a lot of time on it. The hours just drain away, hours that we could have spent hanging smoke detectors. Okay, so the detectors would probably only take a few minutes to hang, and we don't really have any excuses.

So I'm going to pretend that we're slaves to a dream and leave it at that.

Big fans

After a few days of rest and hectic work (the kind we're actually getting paid to do), we got back to dealing with fixing up the rat hole this weekend. We went to Target and got a little cabinet/shelf/towel bar thing to put over the toilet in the master bath so we actually have a place to put our toiletries. We had four boxes of bathroom-type stuff. One box was first aid, one box was stuff for the shower, but two boxes were just...stuff. Okay, it was mostly sunscreen and aloe gel. What can I say. I go through a lot of sunscreen in a summer. Anyway, the shelf looks sort of cute, and it holds plenty of stuff.

We also discovered that the master bathroom has an odd smell. And it's very cold in there. We close the door to conserve heat in the master bedroom, and then when we open it up to use it in the morning, it smells funny. Hello, scented candle. That seems to be doing the trick, for now.

The big event of the weekend, however, was getting the fan in the main (hallway) bathroom working. There is an existing fan (probably from the late 50's or early 60's) in the ceiling, and it works fine. The only problem is that there was a chunk of wood sitting on top of it up in the attic crawl space. Even if the wood wasn't there (it was cut to fit to the fan, by the way), the fan would just vent into the attic space. Today we ran ducting from the fan and drilled a hole into the outside attic wall, where we connected it to a louvered vent thingey. It seems to be working, too. We'll see how well it clears out the condensation after the shower tomorrow.

There were also a couple of wasps that we encountered during this procedure. One of the wasps was dead, caught in the vent at some point in time in the past, but the other was alive, flying around sluggishly until I caught it and put it outside. BIG wasp. I'm wondering if there's a nest or something up in the attic. That'd be great for when we have to clean up there this summer. Just great.

On the agenda for this week: installing the smoke and carbon monoxide detectors we purchased last week. ^_^

Moved in

We haven't been posting because (1) we've been crazy busy and (2) we don't have internet at home any more. We got temporary dial-up yesterday evening, and hopefully our cable will be installed on Friday. I like the internet.

Anyway, we had a successful move on Saturday. Three friends came over and helped out (bless your hearts!), and the rain stayed away until we were finished. They departed, and we picked up a few more things we needed from Home Depot, got dinner, made an appearance at our dojo, and decided to start redoing the hot water plumbing at about 9pm. That was a mistake, because we didn't get finished until a little after 4am. The pex was wonderful to work with, but there were some leaks where the pex was attaching to the valves for the faucets. Oy. We did find out why there was no hot water pressure, though- the pipes were corroded shut. They're fine now, though! We fixed the leaks on Monday, so the water pressure is fine and the water is clean and hot.

Back to Sunday morning. We went back to our apartment, showered, went back to the rat hole, and got to bed about 4:45am. We got up at 8:30 to take the moving van back to U-Haul. It was a beautiful and sunny morning, so although we hadn't slept much, we decided to run errands, and then we went back to take a nap for a few hours. I went to my back massage appointment while my spouse worked on getting the dryer plug to fit (the old stuff wasn't compatible with our new dryer plug), and he finally just had to drill holes in the old face plate after an unsuccessful trip to the hardware store. That evening we started up the washing machine only to encounter a horrible, horrible clanging noise. It took some doing to get the front panel off the washer, but when we finally did, we realized that the wash drum thingey was actually scraping against a dent in the bottom. The previous owners must have used a hand truck to move the thing and dented it. Several swings of a hammer later and it was fixed. Funny- we'd never used a hammer to FIX something before. Whatever works!

Monday was spent fixnig up the plumbing, as mentioned before, and getting some cleaning done. Okay, all the cleaning done. Twelve hours of cleaning yielded one clean apartment, and then we were out. It was really sad. We both cried, because we'd had some wonderful times in that apartment. It was also where we really started our life together. We'll take the memories with us, though, and it'll be okay. We're still settling in at the rat hole, trying to remember where we put stuff and trying to find new homes for things. It'll work itself out.

Now the real fun can begin. ^_^

Friday the 13th

I should have known not to schedule installs on a Friday the 13th. I never go in for the hub-bub, but I got screwed today. No cable install. Meaning no internet. The installer got cold feet and didn't want to run the temporary line across the vacant front lot. I got his manager to make it happen, just not today. Maybe next Friday.

Good news is that the phone was installed. I am considering DSL, but its 14 days out. I bought a modem so at least I'll have dial-up. The Verizon tech's name was Jacob and he was great! Very, very capable.

I bought Rehau Pex tubing today to replace the rusting, clogged hot water pipes to and in the bathrooms. I'll probably do that tomorrow and Sunday.

Sunday may be sunny. A good day to finish moving.

Hot Water

Water, water, everywhere...

So, the Pacific Northwest has been deluged. It has been raining for days, sometimes very hard. We've been getting several inches a day, sometimes. It hasn't made for good moving weather. That's why everyone tries to avoid moving this time of year. Oh well.

Anyway, the electrician showed up today and redid the panel. It looks so much better with all that old junk out, and having that cabinet ripped out of that room gives us a bit more room, if only in terms of perception. It's no longer such a claustrophobic space, even if we can't necessarily use the walls that have been opened up. Now that the new panel is in, a lot more stuff works around the house, like light switches, baseboard heaters (turns out they all work), and, best of all, the hot water heater. Bless hot water. We'll actually be able to bathe. Well, sort of. The water pressure is only good in the kitchen sink and the master sink. Both the tub and the stall shower have craptacular pressure. The sink in the full bath is the worst of all. We'll have to see what we can do about that.

More importantly, the aforementioned rain has raised the water table. We experienced this firsthand as I dug the trench yesterday. What we learned today was that the crawl space flooded as well. That's bad enough- we don't want damp and mold growing under our house. What's really bad, though, is that the water seems to be contaminated from the leach field from the septic tank. Now there's a decidedly sewer-esque odor throughout the house. It's lovely. I guess the smell wasn't as bad this evening as it was this afternoon, and the water had receded a bit as well. We started the stove and some of the baseboards and are hoping that they'll burn away some of the smell and damp.

In the meantime, we're trying to buy a pump. So is the rest of Seattle, apparently. This summer we definitely have to come up with a drainage plan. We'd like to do it before that, but the ground won't dry out until then.

And more rain is in the forecast for the next several days. As long as the water level doesn't get to the floor joists, and the septic contamination stays at a minimum, we should be okay. We'll find out, won't we?

Prep for Electrician

The electrician comes this morning to install a new 200 amp service box (breaker panel). He will also be removing all of the old breaker boxes and consolidating the wiring into the new panel. I hope his day goes smoothly. We did a little prep yesterday for his visit. The old man who owned the house before had built a closet enclosure around the fuse box panels (which is a no-no) so we had to remove it so the electrician could work his magic. My brother-in-law and I did all of the demo with a sawzall, hammer, and pry-bar, although he used bare his hands a lot, too.

These are before and after pictures of the "electrical closet".












We also dug a trench. We will be moving the electrical connection from overhead to underground out of necessity because of the new house going up on the front lot. My spouse did most of the digging. Her brother and I removed the deck planks. The trench had to be 3' deep and 3' long. The first 2' were cake, but then we hit a layer of rock and clay and the hole filled up with water. I think the water is just naturally there because it can't soak through the clay. My spouse spent a lot of time bailing water out of the trench with a bucket so she could excavate more. She got really dirty.

Here's a picture of the deck with the boards being removed.







Here are a couple of pics of the trenching process. My spouse put on her rain coat both because it started to rain and because the trench was really muddy. Her boots sprung a leak early on. We all hope the electrician is happy with the trench.

Tree on front lot

Here's a picture of the big tree on the front lot (that we don't own). The pictures don't do it justice. It's huge! And beautiful! This tree is responsible for most of the debris on our roof, but I don't mind. The trunk splits into four branches about 18'-20' up. I think it's some kind of cedar, but I don't know for sure. I should try to look it up.

Now for the sad news. I think that the builders on the front lot are going to cut it down. The new house footprint gets really close to the base of the tree. I checked with the planning office at city hall and they said that an owner can remove up to two trees a year with no questions asked. This makes us sad. While the absence of the tree will allow a lot more light into our lot, the tree is so wonderful.

Here is a picture of my spouse's brother "measuring" the tree. He's 6'-7" to give you a sense of scale. The diameter of tree might be about 6'. Again, the pictures don't do it justice. It's really pretty big!


Here is a shot up into the canopy. The bark has a wonderful reddish hue.