Ha ha ha!

What were we thinking? More importantly – what were we drinking?

The home that we had bought—what we are now calling the Bonaparte House—was show on the county assessor’s records as being first built in 1926 and continuously owned by members of the Bonaparte family.  We subsequently found fruit crates addressed to the house and bearing a postmark of 1916 – so, we know that the house is actually about a decade older than shown on the official records.  

We bought the house from the son of the original owner and it appeared as though the house had not had any significant maintenance in many years.  We believe that Mrs. Bonaparte lived most of her life in the house—the neighbors have told us stories about her weeding the flower beds when she was 98 years old and having to lay on the ground because it hurt her back to bend over.  The house needed (and still needs) a significant amount of TLC and basic maintenance and we thought we could get it done fairly quickly.

Ah… the sweet memories of delusion.

Anyway—fast forward to Spring 2007 and we decided that it was time to seriously start considering what we wanted to do with the house.  We had spent a significant amount of time making the house livable and fixing up various rooms for daily activities, for example the kitchen, bathroom and baby nursery.  Kristen and I had been thinking about what we wanted to do with the house and had collected 100s of magazine articles, photographs and book clippings of ideas.  In fact, for our first meeting with the architect (Gumerson & Associates of Oklahoma City), I prepared a 150 page PowerPoint presentation that included most of the clippings and ideas we had collected.  Yes—very compulsive, I know.

Throughout the fall of 2007, all of 2008 and into 2009 we worked with the architects to develop our “dream renovation” taking into account everything we wanted to do with the existing house, the detached garage and the outside areas.  For example, we spec’d in a pool and deck – knowing that those two items were probably far down the road.  In the end – we had a rough idea of the “what and where” of what we wanted.  The details for each “component” of the project would be decided in the future within he framework we had developed.

So – flash forward to late spring 2009 and we made the decision to start with the detached garage. 

The current garage is completely uninhabitable or useable for anything more than unsecured storage.  At some point, the tie rafters had been removed and the weight of the roof had pushed the walls outward and racked the entire structure.  As such, the current garage will have to be torn down and a new building constructed.  Kristen and I both agreed that the garage would be a great place to start since it was new construction and because it was not connected to the house—we could continue to live in the house while the garage was being built.  In a way—starting with the garage is an “easy” introduction to construction and contracting and we figure it will allow us to work out the process and make for a smoother process when we commence on the main renovations to the house.

The imagery in this post is the “first round rough drawings” that started us down this process.  The plans gave us a starting framework—but left us with a couple of things to be desired.  Overall, however, we were extremely satisfied and surprised at how close the architects came on the first round of drawings.  I’ll walk through the floor plans and our changes in the next post. 

Stay tuned!

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The guy to the left is Karl Sorocco – and he is the inspiration for this site.  He will also be featured prominently in the content of the site — he has had some terrific adventures and you never know what he might be doing in the future – planes, trains and automobiles!

Anyway – the sorocco.com website has had many incarnations – first as a website in 1999-2000 for Kristen and Douglas’ wedding, then as a website chronicling the adventures of beginning the renovation of an old house, then as a place for all the family members to see pictures of Karl who was born in 2006.  Now – we are going to attempt to aggregate all of this information and content into one site — especially since we are about to engage on a reconstruction of the deatched garage on our property.

Keep an eye on the site for information to come.  

Feel free to sign up for emails when there is new content and stories – simply put your email address into the box on the right and follow the instructions on the pop-up screen you get.  Make sure you click the link in the confirmation email you receive.  We will never sell your name or email address – so, no worries on adding your email to the mailing list.

So – enjoy looking around – feel free to make a comment and let Douglas know if there is anything you would like to see on the site.

Cheers!

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