Started January 27, 2017
Dear Diary, Friends, and Families,
Did you ever read "Under The Tuscan Sun"? I hadn't. Marianne had. On a cold January day in 2005 she spotted a tiny for-sale sign on the place that would become our most ambitious project ever. (Past OR future.) Over four years we recreated a fine Bavarian country estate, an estate that would remain ours for five more years after completion.
This would also be Bavaria's best-document house remodel, with pictures galore and stories reflecting objective status and subjective worries, concerns, defeats, and victories. This is that story, presented here in 2017, but drawn from diaries and pictures created and shared as we went.
Just to get a feel for the extent of the work, here is a link to the "Before/After" photos. Move the cursor over the pictures to see beginning and ending states. Click on each picture to see beginning, in-process, and final condition pictures.
We wrote a log for the 29 months of active planning and construction. These entries were done "real-time" and, for us, are reminders of the thousands of day-to-day decisions.
-- Log Introduction, including a list of our two-dozen vendors and contractors
-- Links to the month-by-month logs:
-- Links to the month-by-month logs:
Between House And Barn Projects |
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The Log Introduction gave our overall expectations in 2006:
| "I expected that some of our entries would be fun, some exciting, some scary, and a few downright discouraging. In the end, it would be another set of stories, the only currency we can save and enjoy." |
The experience must have been a success because, a decade later, we still tell the stories to ourselves and anyone else who will listen.
It broke our hearts to have to sell our Pommersfelden house. Here is a link to the real estate agent's pictures of the house. The listing worked and we sold it and moved on. As we always expected, we lost money, but memories always have a cost and cash is the easiest payment.
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