Rimfire Road

About the photographs

The photographs are 768x512 (the orientation varies from photo to photo), and are in JPG format. The sizes range from 40 to 60K. Originally, the phtos came in one lump mass of a PWP file, a proprietary "photo album" format; it was fairly tedious to extract them into a more useful format - another reason why we're going to a digital camera. I had to extract them into TIF file format, at which point each image was over 1MB. I brought them over to my Linux box and converted them to PNG format, which reduced the sizes by half. For web distribution, I converted them to JPG. Believe me, the original TIFs were no better quality than the final JPGs.

About the house

The house sits in the middle of 5 (4.x irrigated) acres off of Rimfire Road, a gravel road which dead ends less than 50 meters from our driveway. At the end of the road is a neighbor, and on the other side of her property is the Descutes National Forest.

The house is smallish; that is to say, the dining room, living room, and master bedroom are not spacious. The secondary bedrooms are of average size, as is the secondary bathroom. The master bathroom is very nice, with a deep whirlpool style tub and a shower. There is a wrap around porch which the dining room shares with e living room, and the master bedroom has its own porch. The kitchen is reasonably sized, and seems larger for sharing a space with the breakfast area. Our only complaint about the kitchen is that it lacks counter space. What counter space there is, is tile, and there is a nice cooking island in the center of the kitchen, in which the range is built.

The house is heated by oil and forced air, and the domestic water comes from Avion. The windows are insulated and are the wonderful swing-out horizontal kind, rather than the sliding kind.

The property is flat and well cleared and irrigated. There is PVC fencing around the front part of the property, and wire around the rest. There is an irrigation pond near the front of the property. The landscaping is nice, if simple, and there are birch trees on the north side of the house (a nice change from the standard dwarf pines that grow all over the place here). We don't have any neighbors to speak of, or at least none you can see from the house. Again, the Deschutes National Forest is just down the road, so it is pretty private here.

Note: The neighbor situation has changed. Within six months of moving here, neighbors on either side of us built houses on the plots that used to provide buffer space. By far, the worst is the neighbor to the South, whose positioning of the house can only be described as mean spirited. But, what do they care? They weren't going to live in the thing, only sell it as soon as their mother, who is currently residing in the monstrosity, dies.

We're really happy with the house; it meets all of our requirements, and they weren't easy requirements to fill.

About the subject matter

The photos

• The secondary bathroom
• The back pasture
• Backporch: Standing on the back porch, lookin east/north-east over the back yard to the back pasture.
• Backyard.Standing in the back yard, looking in the same direction as previous photo.
• Standing in the back yard, looking back toward the house.
• Backyard again. I think this one is mislabeled, and is actually taken from just outside the master bedroom looking south east, toward the Deschutes National Forest.
• Dining room, looking south east into the front room. The stone column on the right is the fireplace.
• Dining room, looking north east.
• The front door, from the front room. The dining room and kitchen are off to the right, the hallway leading back to the bedrooms is off to the left.
• Frontyard down Driveway. This is facing west; the forest if off to the left, and Bend is north west.
• Front yard, looking back at the house. That push-out area is the kitchen breakfast area. Facing W/NW.
• One of the guest bedrooms. The other is similar.
• The kitchen. Behind us is the opening to the dining area; you can see the breakfast area on the left. Pictured is the cooking isle and sink.
• Kitchen, facing West. From the above picture, turned left about 80 degrees. On the left is the range and microwave.
• Living room. Facing South-East. You can see here the porch, the skylights, and the sharply vaulted ceilings. There are four skylights in the living room. To the left is the fireplace.
• Master bath. My favorite part of the house. As you can see, the whirlpool tub is set in an alcove, surrounded by windows. I love this. You can't tell from this picture, but the view is pretty nice from the tub. "Welcome to my house; would you like to sit in our tub?"
• Master bathroom counter. Monika hates this photo, because it makes the bathroom look bad. The current residents didn't clean up after themselves this morning. What you don't see fromm this picture is the huge walk-in closet behind us, and the french doors to the right which separates this area from the master bedroom.
• Master bathYou can't tell much from this picture; to the right is the shower, and on the other side of that door is the porch for the master suite. To the left is the bath.
• Master bedroom. To the left is the master bath, and you can see the porch the bedroom shares with the bathroom. I must admit, I'm not sure why they put a door from the bathroom onto the porch; I imagine at one time that bathroom may have served some other purpose.
• Master bedroom. Another view of the master bedroom. The bath is behind; the porch to the left.
• Monty, one of our cats. The photo was on the roll.
• North, from the porch. This photo looks out over the North part of our property. You can tell our property line pretty easily, because the North neighbors haven't cleared their land. There is about an acre and a half on the North pasture, two acres on the East, and another long half acre on the south. I'd say about an acre is not in pasture; the house and garden area probably takes up 3/4 of an acre, and the rest was left "indigenous growth," which means scrub.