Views from the House

It's been just over a year since we've moved in, and we are enjoying the house.  Here are some views from the house.

Stormy night taken from the front yard looking at lighting in the West valley.

View of Downtown Phoenix from the back yard after a rainy day.

We had a little visitor checking out our front yard.

Sunset view from the Den courtyard.

We could see the rising warm water vapor coming from the Palo Verde Nuclear Generating Plant Cooling Towers, located about 60 miles toward the west.  It made for a lovely sunset.

... And The Kitchen Sink

Some of our fans asked us to post a photo of the Kitchen sink.  So here it is.  Ignore all the cardboard and stuff over the island. We are keeping cardboard there to prevent damage from the workers, who tend to lay their tools and other stuff on the island.

I also climbed up the hill and took a couple pictures of the outside of the house from an elevated perspective. The sky was so clear and beautiful out!

Mid Morning Sun over Phoenix

I caught this interesting photo of the sun over Phoenix while visiting the lot.  At first, I noticed a faint rainbow entirely around the sun, so I took a photo of it. When I got home, I enhanced the photo to bring out the blue color of the sky and increase the contrast of the rainbow "Halo".  Pretty interesting!

See Wikipedia article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halo_(optical_phenomenon)

Framing Garage at Night

George and I drove up to the lot last night, as the sky was cloudless and clear, to see how the views and surrounding hills look in the dark.  There are no streetlights inside the community, so we were hoping the stars were more visible from the hill.  Downtown Phoenix is still only a few miles away, so we will never see the full array of stars. But at least we hope for a hint.

At this stage of building, the garage is fully framed out, with the outer kitchen walls nearly complete.  This photo shows the garage and outer kitchen wall, above, with the sky and stars peeking through the windows and roofless ceiling.

View West from Patio

Here's a view facing West, from the patio, which is still being completed. You can see the trusses that will be supporting the patio deck below.

Framing and Roof Trusses

Here's some progress on the framing of the house, with the roof trusses waiting in the street, shown on the right-hand side of the picture.

Western Wall

(Not to be confused with The Western Wall).

This will be the West wall of the house, with views facing the desert.  Hopefully we'll see some nice sunsets through those windows.

View of Lot Before Breaking Ground

Here's a view of the lot before we broke ground.  The double-cactus, grand and impressive, was a prominent feature of the lot. It was beginning to look diseased, and quite frankly would have been in the way of most of the construction. So, unfortunately, we had to take it down.  This photo will be emblazon its grandeur forever.