Chapter 245: Mansion Shopping

Sunday, June 19, 2005 (Continued)

Mom, Vanessa and Julia arrived back at 4pm. Vanessa told Dad and me, "I've got plenty of pictures in my camera of the four properties we looked at today. We're going to go to Mark's study, load the pictures onto his computer, and use his large screens to display them while we discuss our choices. I'll pick up some Chinese takeout for dinner on the way home, to give you time to clean up before you come over. How does that sound?"

Apart from the sad fact that Chinese don't make pizza - it's otherwise a wonderful culture though - it sounded perfect to me. Dad was also eager, so Vanessa and Julia headed off to gather dinner. Dad and I tidied up while Mom inspected the results of our day's work.

I sent a text message to Carol, "Everyone at Julia's house for dinner and talk about mansion. I'll try to save u some Chinese." [I didn't get an answer from her for nearly an hour, and then it was, "I'll come soon."]

Mom called the mother of the girl Donna was visiting. The girls were running around somewhere, and that woman said Donna could have dinner with them.

We took two vehicles to Julia's because I'd probably stay overnight. I invited Mom to come in my car so she could see I was a good driver. Prof had advised me to do that, but I'd never got around to it before now, ironically just after Mom had canceled her driving restriction.

Displaying Vanessa's pictures on eight 24" screens was VERY impressive, even though most of the photos were landscape oriented. Everyone commented on how great my computer system was (it should be too, for the size of the check I'd written!). I was more interested in the pictures than what they were displayed on, especially because the houses looked GORGEOUS!

My excitement didn't last long, as the discussion about the pictures was BORING! It was repeated four times over (once for each property), and with many comparisons between Property A and Property B. It was made even worse because Vanessa was keeping quiet about the women's preferred choice until the end.

I'll save you the four-times repeated tedious descriptions of construction materials, where the sun rose in the morning and set at night, soil drainage, and SO MUCH MORE that was of no interest whatsoever to me. I'll just describe the key aspects of the preferred property, which is the place that we ended up buying.

Corvallis is built immediately to the west of the north-flowing Willamette River - an important river, as the Willamette Valley contains most of Oregon's population. Nearly all the houses in Corvallis, our school, OSU, etc., are in a two mile by two mile roughly square area immediately to the west of the river, but not our preferred property. It is located about 3.5 miles southeast of the main bridges that cross the Willamette River into town, making the house about 4.5 miles from the geographic center of Corvallis. The property is on SE Peoria Road, the same road as the driveway I'd buried the $100 Binion's chip under, although that'd been at the other end of the road. It was the closest of the four shortlisted properties to town, which I hoped would make it easier for Donna's Ducklings and Carol's Cuties to visit. I considered the easy supply of young, teenage girls to be an important criterion when buying a multimillion dollar home. Strangely, none of the adults had mentioned that yet, proving that women aren't perfect at buying a new home for a teenage boy.

The property was flat, as was all the land around the property, including all the way to town. That made easy biking for teenage girls, but gave poor views, other than of the hills immediately north and west of Corvallis. The properly was 5.7 acres (2.3 hectares), making it the smallest of our four shortlisted properties. It was about 250 yards deep (exactly in the north-south direction) by 110 yards wide, and completely level other than a twelve-foot high, flat-topped, artificial mound that the house had been built on. The mound was located about 175 yards back from the road, midway between the two side boundaries.

The house was built on the back (southern) side of the mound, and slightly displaced to the east, with swimming and spa pools built into the front and west side of the mound, sufficiently west that the house shaded them only in the mornings. The house was a large rectangular prism, running east-west, so the long sides faced north to the road or south to the sun. It had three levels:

1. The top level was mostly bedrooms and bathrooms. There weren't enough bedrooms for all of us, but the solution to that is described below. It had only one full master bedroom but was easily renovated to make a second suite to accommodate both sets of parents.

2. Ground level (by which I mean level with the top of the mound) had the kitchen, dining, living room and a sizable office. Julia joked that her mom had instantly declared, "Prof and I have first dibs on that!"

3. Under ground (inside the mound) was a large basement which contained a "Guys' Room" and a garage capable of holding four cars. The garage was entered by driving around the east side of the mound and in from the rear.

The house was 5,300 square feet, 5 bedrooms, 4.5 bathrooms. Every time I'd heard of half a bathroom I'd always thought it sounded silly. My face must have given me away, because Vanessa explained, "Upstairs has a master bedroom with an en-suite, so that's the first bathroom. There's another large bedroom with an en-suite they're calling a second master bedroom, but that's claiming too much for it. We'd knock down a wall into the next bedroom and make a full master bedroom, en-suite and walk-in closet for your parents. So that's the second bathroom and three of the advertised bedrooms accounted for. There are two other normal-sized bedrooms upstairs, with a normal bathroom between them accessed off the hallway, all three of those rooms on the north side. There's a full bathroom on the ground floor, making four. And there's half a bathroom just inside from the garage, also accessible off the games room. It's got just a toilet, washbasin and shower. That's intended for when people have been working outside and they're too grubby to walk through the house."

"Thanks Vanessa."

The house was the least luxurious of the four, but FAR more luxurious than my existing home, and even noticeably better than the Williams'. It lacked a lot of the "mod cons" expected in an almost $3 million dollar house - most of which, I must confess, I didn't understand. Why would we need a "Butler's Pantry" when we wouldn't be having a Butler? And even if we did, why would he need his own pantry? I was amused by one of its features though: an elevator from the garage, up to the ground and top floors. I'd never known anyone who had an elevator in their home.

The male owner was a very enthusiastic "boutique winemaker", another phrase that confused me, as I thought boutiques sold trendy and horribly overpriced clothes. I heard many dozens of terms that confused me during this discussion, so I'll stop mentioning them. About half the land was planted in vines, and he had his own little winery in a separate building on the site and several casks in storage in a cellar built into the mound (which was probably another reason for the mound). The storage room was earmarked for conversion to Dad's workshop, as it was next to the garages and had a doorway large enough to drive a car into.

The female owner ran a "Bed and Breakfast" type business. Several years ago they'd had two single-level modular homes trucked in and installed near the front of their property. They were both the same and quite small, each with one large bedroom with a king-size bed, a second bedroom with one double bed and a three-high stack of bunk-beds, exactly 1.0 bathrooms, a living room, a small combined kitchen-and-dining room, and an even smaller laundry. They were each about two-thirds the square footage of my current home, which is somewhat small itself.

The property had been on the market for nearly a year because the sellers were asking too much for it: $2.9 million. Its being quite a large properly for one so close to town, and having two income-generating businesses with their assets, were the sellers' justifications for the high price. Unfortunately for the sellers, people looking to spend $2.9 million on a home were rarely looking to have to operate two businesses on the property, and were looking for more luxury and upmarket features than this house provided. Also unfortunately for the sellers, Mrs. Seller was getting too infirm to be unable to look after such a big property and three houses, so they were increasingly eager to sell so they could move somewhere much smaller and easier to maintain.

Our plan for the property, I was told, was to move the two modular houses so that one of them was on the west side of the mound. It'd be placed so it ran east-west (same as the mansion), with the front of the modular house level with the front of the mansion. There'd be about a twenty-foot gap between the two buildings. To help you visualize the layout, imagine your keyboard is the mound, looking north to the road. The mansion covers the area from the "N" to "/" keys. The first modular house will be put where the left "Shift" to "X" keys are. The swimming pool is "W" to "R", the spa pool is "Y". That's not very accurate or to scale (e.g., the mound is more oval than the keyboard is, and the mansion is wider than the modular houses), but it should give you an idea of the relative positions.

The second modular home would be placed in line with and to the west of the first modular home, putting it on the ground beside the mound. It wouldn't be exactly in line, as the west-most end of it would be pulled south a bit, so it'd be angled outward to face 10 or 11 o'clock. This was because the mound wasn't large enough for both modular houses, and it'd take too much time to enlarge the mound for it, so the building had to be placed at ground level. If it faced directly north like the other two buildings, it'd have a twelve-foot high earthen wall (the west side of the mound) badly obscuring its view. By turning it away slightly, its outlook improved considerably.

The two modular homes would be about twenty feet apart horizontally (maybe a little more, the architect was yet to decide), and necessarily twelve feet apart vertically. That gap was going to be fully enclosed, joining the two modular homes together. The room that'd be created by enclosing that gap would contain the staircase between the two modular homes, the new front door, and new back doors.

The lower modular house was going to be left very much as it was, even including the furnishings as the sellers didn't want to take them when they left; they'd only take the furniture from the mansion. The only suggestion the parents had for changing the lower house was perhaps fitting a fireplace, but they were lukewarm over that idea.

The top modular home was going to be gutted and re-fitted out. The stair's top landing, which would be in the northwest corner of the top modular home, would have three doors off it:

1. One, turning left at the top of the stairs, would lead outside the front of the house onto a path that'd lead the short distance to the pool.

2. Straight ahead from the stairs, the door would lead to the master bedroom, which would be a HUGE bedroom taking the entire length and the front half of the house (apart from the small landing). Julia had plans to do something very special with the master bedroom, decoratively speaking. I had plans to do something very enjoyable IN it, with as many girls as I could lure therein, that being my idea of how best to decorate my bedroom.

3. Turning right at the top of the stairs would go into an ordinary-sized second bedroom. Mom and Dad thought of it as the "spare bedroom", as they still thought Carol and Donna would be living in the mansion. When they were convinced to let Carol live with me, that room would be publicly called "Carol's Bedroom", not that she'd use it.

Looking at the top modular home from the road, the small front corner on the right (the house's NW corner) would be the stair's top landing, with the entire rest of the front half of the house being the master bedroom. The back half of the house would have three rooms in it. The back right corner (SW) would be Carol's bedroom, the back center would be the master bedroom's very large walk-in closet, and the back left corner (SE) would be the master bedroom's en-suite bathroom, with a shower large enough for several friends, Julia promised, because we enjoyed having fun squeezed into sharing her house's shower. Essentially, that modular home was going to be turned into "Mark's Master Bedroom," which sounded great to the Mark it was named after.

In a moment when the adults were talking noisily (there were plenty of such moments) Julia quietly told me that there'd deliberately be only one obvious door into the second bedroom, the one from the landing. So if someone came up the stairs and knocked on my bedroom door, there'd be no obvious way "for anyone" (Julia then whispered "Carol" very quietly) to get back to the other bedroom. Julia had the idea of having a secret door between the two bedrooms, or maybe between the second bedroom and the walk-in closet. That way Carol could get back and forth without any visitors to the property knowing.

There was an uncertainty over our study. One option was to have it at the far end of the master bedroom. That'd work fine, provided I didn't want a very big study, because that'd block access to the en-suite. Another option was to build it inside the other modular house, probably by converting one of the bedrooms. The third option was to build it inside the "Staircase Room" - the room we'd be creating to connect the two modular homes. Once it was explained to me, I realized the Staircase Room was going to be a substantial room, about twenty to twenty five feet long, and similarly wide.

How long the room would be was the result of how far apart the two modular homes would be placed. The architect needed to do some more work before he could decide on that, especially in getting accurate ground levels for that area. The pitch of the stairs was relevant too, as we didn't want the stairs to be steep. The width of the Staircase Room was also flexible, as it would extend south to protrude past the southern walls of the two modular houses. This was so it could provide covered access to "Mark's Garages" and "The Tunnel" (which I'll explain shortly). It'd also have a backdoor to the outside.

Assuming the Staircase Room was about twenty feet by twenty feet (which was reasonably likely, and if otherwise it'd probably be larger), then it'd be a very big room, easily large enough to contain a study. Or we could build a couple more bedrooms in there, or if we threw caution to the winds, even a wine cellar, for when I bought a bottle of wine. After some thought and discussion, I easily preferred using it for our study.

The existing front and back doors into both modular homes would be removed. The main entrance into "Mark's House" or "Mark's Wing" - as the collective construction was inconsistently called - would be the front door into the Staircase Room. Less grand entrances would be the back door into the Staircase Room, the door from the stair's top landing to the front of the mound near the pool (the only entrance to the top modular home),, and the living room in the lower half of my house could have ranch-sliders onto a deck, if we built one. The front door into the Staircase Room would be on the west side of its front wall. Coming inside and then:

• Walking straight in a couple more yards then turning right, would take you into the lower modular house through its original front door.

• Turning left immediately inside the front door would take you up the stairs. They'd be against the front wall of the Staircase Room, and lead up to "Mark's Master Bedroom" (a.k.a. "The Den of Iniquitous Delights").

• Going straight ahead would take you across the Staircase Room and out one of the three rear exits, to the outside, the garage or tunnel.

Assuming the stairs to be four feet wide allowed for a study which was sixteen feet front to back, and potentially up to seventeen feet wide if we accepted having only a hallway from the front door through to the back doors. Assuming that 30" screens get invented by someone soon, my computer screens will occupy a wall area about 6 feet wide by 4.5 feet high, so 27 square feet. If I set up facing the mansion, that wall would be nearly twenty feet tall: its normal eight feet plus twelve feet for the mound, unless we chose to have a lower ceiling on it (the ROOF would slope down at the rate twelve feet vertically over twenty feet horizontally, but the CEILING could match the roof, or have a uniform 8-foot height, or something in between).

I liked the idea of an angled ceiling, so assuming 17 feet of usable height (above the desk) by 16 feet of usable width, gave 272 square feet, ten times more than the 27 square foot area I'd need when I upgraded to the first 30" screens that come out. In other words, I could merge three more times and still fit enough screens on the wall for all of my minds to study (sixty four of them!). I had no intention of merging even once more, so only running into space problems after four more merges was not much of a worry.

#1:

Carol, Julia and Ava would want space to study too. If I faced the mansion with Carol beside me, we'd have sixteen feet north to south, which was plenty. With Julia and Ava behind us facing the other way, the room would need to be about twelve feet east to west, which left at least eight feet of width free for the 'hallway' through to the back, which sounded ample to me.

I explained my design to everyone, and they were all happy with it. Where being "happy with it" didn't stop them immediately suggesting many changes. All they really needed me to do was tell them the size of my study, and they'd do the rest. All of their suggestions (those I understood anyway) sounded good to me, and none of them seemed to mess up my studying process, so I was happy. One major source of discussion was the front foyer to the Staircase Room; the women wanted to make that spectacular, because "first impressions count."

Potentially we could do some fancy building in the Staircase Room (such as building another couple of bedrooms above my study, if we gave that a normal-height ceiling), but the adults preferred not to. We had no need for those improvements, they'd take more time and so delay our occupancy, they'd be more expensive, and all that work would be wasted if we ever wanted to separate the two modular homes again. Building just the one room, our study, inside the Staircase Room was easy and best.

I should explain the proposed location of my house's garages and the tunnel. The mound was a slightly oval-shaped rectangle, with its long axis running east-west. The top modular home would on the west side and back half of the mound. It wouldn't be all the way back though, so there'd be some of the mound behind it. We were going to excavate all the south-west corner of the mound, under and behind where my Master Bedroom would be placed, as well as cut a very large ditch the rest of the way across the mound to the mansion.

Under the Master Bedroom would be placed a series of nine-foot diameter concrete pipes, laid all the way to the mansion, angling up slightly to meet its basement at the exterior wall of the Guys' Room, where a doorway would be cut. This would create a quick and easy tunnel.

Immediately south of the pipeline would be built a large concrete block room, capable of holding five or so cars parked side by side. It'd be much the same size, shape and orientation as the top modular house, only dug into the mound at ground level, twelve feet lower and a few feet behind, the modular house. The tunnel and garage would be re-buried, with the top modular home then placed on top and slight in front of the pipeline (there'd be about five feet of overlap, but that's not important).

That had been pretty much how the Mansion's garages had been built, so we'd be copying that. It was easy and it kept the garages out of sight. Because they'd be buried, there'd be no need to decorate their exterior walls with fancy bricks or whatever, so the whole process would actually be relatively cheap. Looking at the mound from the south would show a bizarrely large number of garage doors, but the mound was built near the southern boundary so we didn't use that area (it'd mostly be for Donna's horse). Farther to the south were just farmers' fields, so no one else would care either.

There was already a driveway that ran down the east side of the property and around to the southern side of the mound. We'd extend it to continue farther around the back of the mound to my garages on the west side of the rear of the mound. The main house had a visitors' parking area northeast of the mound, with a path from it that led up to the mound and into the house's front door. We'd create a parking area behind my garages for my visitors. I mentally added a large bike rack to my image of that area.

I was astonished by the tunnel idea, but apparently it'd be surprisingly easy. The mound was artificial, so easy to dig. A large chunk of it was going to be removed to make room for the garages, so digging some more wasn't even a small deal, let alone a big one. Concrete pipes were easily obtained, and fitting them with floor, wall and ceiling panels to make a hallway inside the pipe would be easy too, as the panels could be prefabricated offsite and quickly secured into place once the pipes were laid. The tunnel wouldn't be luxurious, but it'd be okay. It'd be well insulated by the mound, so temperature wouldn't be a problem. The spaces outside the wall panels but inside the pipe would be very convenient for running water pipes and electric cables to my house too.

The idea of the tunnel was mostly a matter of convenience for getting back and forth between the two buildings on wet days, but it might also be useful for security and safety reasons. Right from when they'd first started looking at properties, Vanessa and Mom hadn't wanted me to have a totally detached dwelling, because the security issues worried them. They could've built a covered walkway (effectively a hallway) from the end of my bedroom to the mansion, but the buried tunnel was actually quicker, easier and cheaper, mainly because there'd be no pressure to decorate it. Having it underground also made the top of the mound visually cleaner and easier to walk around.

For security reasons, the doors at either end would be made unobvious, which is what had given Julia the idea of having a secret door between my master bedroom and Carol's bedroom. That was why the Staircase Room would protrude a few feet out of the back of the house, so the first few feet of the mound-side wall could be a secret door into the tunnel, then a normal door into the garage.

Julia had also suggested a trapdoor from the Master Bedroom's walk-in closet down into the tunnel, but everyone else, including me when I heard of it, thought that was too melodramatic. If I was awake enough to drop through a trapdoor and run into the mansion, then I was awake enough to defend myself. Between 50 kg of NP force (through eyeballs and into brains if necessary), my Aikido skills, and light blobs for illumination at night if necessary, I could now defend myself EXTREMELY well. Another point in favor of this house was that the Corvallis Police Station was just on the other side of the bridges into town, so if we called the cops in an emergency, it'd take them less than two minutes to arrive, once they'd finished their donuts - after my experiences with them, I don't have a particularly high opinion of individual cops.

The existence of the tunnel wouldn't be highly secret, as it'd have to be included in the building permit plans and plenty of workmen would see it being laid, but it could be useful against people like the two who'd kidnapped Prof and me.

On which subject, the new property and its buildings were going to be FAR better secured than our existing homes. The Williamses were determined not to have another kidnapping, and I was inclined to agree with them. They mentioned some things, such an alarm system that'd scream when it was disabled rather than go quiet like their last one had. They also liked the idea of an easily visible decoy alarm system, with the real one hidden behind a pop-out panel. Mostly they said they'd research it over the next several weeks and then hire some expert advice, as it'd take that long for the sale to go through.

There were many obvious things we'd be doing, like my house having good soundproofing and toughened, mirrored glass, superb drapes that prevented any inward views at night (as mirrored glass doesn't work so well at night when the room is well lit), with motion sensors around the houses tied into the alarms, unlike the two cheap ones that Prof had installed outside Julia's bedroom.

The idea of having secret doors at the ends of the tunnel had been news to Dad, but he got quite excited thinking about the fun of doing it. Dad's handy with his hands (being "handy" with your feet would be very confusing, although better than being feety with your hands), so he was capable of making clever doors and doing simple wiring. He suggested getting the builders to create the doorways, "Then after they leave, I can make and hide the doors. I could even make door catches which worked on DC, off a constantly recharging sealed battery, so a power failure wouldn't matter. Each door could even have two or more switches in series. One hidden under the carpet maybe, so you'd have to stand on exactly the right place, then press another switch. Both would have to be activated at the same time for the door to open."

The modular houses themselves were nothing special, but they were well furnished. I was warned that I wouldn't be living in luxury, but that didn't worry me. The study could be decorated as luxuriously as I wanted, which wasn't much as I was mainly going to be staring at screens with my eyes shut. Julia was already showing great enthusiasm for decorating the master bedroom excessively. I would make damn sure there was no pink involved! Other than studying or being in my bedroom, most of my time would be spent inside the mansion, for meals, as an excellent example.

On the topic of food, earlier in the conversation Dad had quipped that the parents should live in the modular houses and I should live in the mansion, seeing as I was paying for it. That idea was so stupid I laughed, and then pointed out, "It's EXTREMELY important that the cooks live very close to the best kitchen." The modular houses' kitchens were barely large enough to deserve that name.

Landscaping came up because more than half the property needed work. The grapevines had to be removed, and the ground at least sown with grass, planted in gardens, or whatever else the women wanted. Vanessa likes gardening, so she'd have a five acre, almost empty canvas to play with.

To my surprise, I discovered that my lack of interest in the landscaping topic wasn't total, when Vanessa mentioned, "We don't really want to look out of the kitchen window to see a never-ending series of sexual escapades going on around the pool. We have to keep the pool visible from the house for safety reasons, but we'll landscape an area next to the pool so it'll still get the sun but you'll have privacy behind it. Okay Mark?"

"Sounds great, thanks. Are you going to be so helpful as to provide the girls for me as well, or do I have to find them for myself? Haha."