Welcome to the new house page.

2,598 sq. ft. This is more than twice the size of our old house, so it was a big deal for us. We now have a 3 car garage, a game room, an office, a very nice kitchen and bedrooms bigger than what we used to. We tend to have guests on a regular basis, and I am sure they feel more comfortable in the new house.
When you want a bigger place in Silicon Valley, you need to learn one word: Commute.

Floor plan
Below you can see the house during its construction. The house started as dirt and all dirt looks the same everywhere ...still, we got you a picture of the dirt. The constructor took forever to finish the house (that's a very long story) so hang on for a while.
The house is located in Gilroy, CA. Home of the Garlic Festival.

This is a drawing of the lot. By then most houses had been completed in this development except for our block, which was the last one in the development. We plan to include a pool and therefore we wanted a bigger lot than the others. We got it in April 97 with a tentative delivery of October 97. Yeah, right !

From dirt to a house.

Here is what it used to look like (dirt) and what it should look like (except for color) in a few years after it is built. Progress pictures below.

Getting ready for the foundation. Next is the base for the floor and pipes.

We have a ground floor. You can see some of the rooms laid out.

The first floor is coming up and there are stairs to go up...

A second floor with air conditioning.

This is looking more like a house now. Waiting for a roof.

Finally we have a roof, although it has not been finished. A while later some of the better details of the house are showing up. As you can see the progress is painfully slow due to the size of the crew working on the last houses. Bummer. It's been a year so far at this point.

But let us not get into the cause of the delays just yet. There have been plenty of delays from El Niño, raining on us all the time, (about 120 days in 1998) and other details lawyers love to deal with. But anyway... Here is the view of house from the front and back at the time.

I'd say this looks like a house now. It has electrical outlets, gas, audio, video and so on. Many of the advances had been made inside the house.

Want to to see a picture of the house 3 months later? (August 98) You just did above. As you can tell this fantastic builder LJW Enterprises, owned by Larry Willard from Los Gatos CA works very fast. He likes to play games and he is a real people person. Perhaps I'll have a house built by the year 2000, but then in Larry's time that may be a very aggressive schedule. He prefers houses to be built by lawyer's fees. If you plan to buy from Larry make sure you have plenty of money to spend on lawyers. I would not recommend him or his companies to my worst enemy.

And here we are a few months later work is happening again. At this time our "delivery" date was around mid November. We'll see.

October almost a whole year and house is almost ready

The roof is finished, a few neighbors have moved in. And inside it is looking like like real house now.. Walls, painted rooms, doors and things like that are in place. Could it be possible that we get to move this November ? Unbelievable... Amazing. Almost two years later...
You can see the driveway about to be poured in. Then comes the sod.

It's almost the end of October, and a few people have moved into their houses. Ours gets garage doors, the house is fully painted inside, we have a concrete driveway, painted doors, fire alarms, ceiling fans and a front yard. We are waiting for cabinets, appliances, tile and carpeting.
What a difference it makes when someone is actually doing their work. Our latest closing date is November 30th.

As you can guess by now, we got to move in in December 9th, 1998. After all the trouble we had, we are happy in our house and we got our pool. The pool is another story though...

We have been very happy living in Gilroy and we have lots of friends. People are so friendly here!
We had a really nice time in Gilroy, we enjoyed our house, our pool and our friends. In 2003 we had to move on and went to Boston. Talk about a change, from daily 95 degree weather to cold and snow.

This page visited times since June 26, 1997.

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