A Winter Walk Around Our House
These are more pictures made for my sister in Florida. This is a
clockwise tour around the outside of our house (at 2001 Dunbar Road
just outside the Manhattan, Kansas, city limits), where the left side of one
picture is usually the right side of the next. These pictures were
taken by an amateur (me) using a $13 WalMart-special camera, so some of them
are fuzzy or a bit over-exposed from bright sunlight.
Looking west past the porch/deck (see next picture) on the north end of
our house. The upper deck outside our second-floor bedroom is just
visible. The tower is part of my HAM-radio hobby. The windmill
is a hundred-year-old Aermotor and there is a wellpit beneath it, but
there's also an electric pump in the wellpit, and the windmill's downrod isn't
connected to anything. In the background are pine trees we planted
shortly after we moved out here in 1972.
Our front/north porch. Of course, there's a porch swing, although
it's barely visible in this picture. The white sign beside the door
says "Please make deliveries at the east door", and the vertical pipe is another
of my ham-radio antennas masquerading as a flagpole. The left end of
this porch is just-barely visible on the right side on the next picture.
Our east/side porch "ells" with the front/north porch. The brown
object on a post in the left background is a heated birdbath, the trailer
behind it is loaded with another ham-radio tower, and it looks like I should
use that snow shovel just to the left of our east door!
A better view of the east door. When we bought the house, there
were three narrow windows where that picture window is, but I grew up
with a picture window and always wanted one there, so one summer, after Nancy
left to help at a week-long camp for handicapped kids, I ripped those old
windows out, took a final measurement of the opening, and called a lumber yard
where I had already made preliminary arrangements. When the new window
arrived six days later, the delivery guys lifted it up to the opening where
I nailed it in place! Nancy was really supprised when she
drove in the next day!
The heater in the bottom part of that insulation is working hard to
keep a hole in the ice in our birdbath (bird-water-er?) The
dining-room window on the left is just visible in the next picture.
Nancy's adult-size tricycle in the "parking lot" (or "general use area"?)
beneath the bathroom window, our rear porch on the left, our garage in the
background, and our poleshed 'way out beyond the basketball goal.
(I don't play basketball, but someone gave the goal to me about the
time we were pouring the garage apron, so "Why not?"!
Our rear porch and the south end of our house, with the utility-room
window on the left. The glassy-looking stuff on the end of the house
is a passive solar collector I built in the mid-70's, back when a tax credit
covered 70% of its cost. Looks like I should also use that black snow
shovel hanging just to the right of the steps! (I'm beginning to wonder
how I got out of the house, since I haven't yet seen any
footprints in any of these pictures!)
A sideways view of the back porch, with the bird water-er on the right,
our closest neighbor's house in the background, and our "stone shed" on the
left. The "thing" hanging out of the upstair's window is a cover
for a window fan (by choice, our house is not airconditioned during the
summer), and the snow-covered "thing" below the utility-room window is the top
of Nancy's "greenhouse" built into our basement's south egress window.
The stone shed, with the Aermotor windmill just visible in the background
and lumber-storage left of the door. This shed was my workroom until we
built the 27x50' garage in 1993, but now it just stores "stuff".
And finally, a picture of our three closest neighbors (one in the big
stone house, one in the little stone house, and one in the itty-bitty wood
house between them) taken through the picture window mentioned earlier.
This page was created in 2004 and last modified in 2010.