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Here is the front door to the house. Let's start with a tour of the inside and then move on outside. |
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This is a view of the living room. The entire main floor is done in a light colored wood. Over the fireplace is a print of a painting of the Interior of St Peter's Cathedral by Giovanni Panini. I had been looking for several years for a copy of this painting and finally found it a couple of weeks before I moved into the house. |
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Here is a more close-up view of my Panini Print. For a high resolution copy to download, visit my Panini Page . |
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This print is a detail from a much larger painting entitled 'Flora and Fauna' by Botticelli. He is most famous for 'Venus on the Half Shell'. Since I wasn't looking for a nude painting for my living room, this seemed like a better choice. |
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This is a print of the Roman Coliseum as it would have looked in 300 A.D. I came across it in an art book I was reading. I searched on the internet for the author, Bruno Brizzi, and located a store in Rome that was selling the print . |
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This is a set of prints I picked at the Library of Congress when I passed through Washington D.C. on vacation in the spring of 1993. The Vatican Library was putting on a special exhibition to say thank you to the Library of Congress for sending over several people to help them set up a card catalog system for their collection way back in the 1930's. |
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This is a picture of dining room taken from the living room. The main floor is about 850 square feet and contains the living room, dining room, kitchen, and half bath. To maximize the floor space on a small lot, the rooms are not the traditional square shapes. |
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The kitchen. The main floor has very high ceilings. In the kitchen this means that much of the shelf space is too high even for me to reach. |
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On to the second floor. This floor has about 1200 square feet; two bedrooms, two baths, and a laundry room. This is a view of the master bedroom. |
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The master bedroom is roughly 17 x 22 but trapezoidal shaped instead of square. It has a private 8 x 12 deck overlooking the lake. The picture on the easel is Audrey Hepburn from Breakfast at Tiffany's. |
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On another wall of my bedroom is this print, entitled 'Silver', by the painter Albert Moore. He was English and most of his works date from the 1880's. |
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The master bath has a Jacuzzi tube, a glass block shower, and a 12 x 16 walk-in closet with two built-in dressers. |
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Another view of the master bath. This picture on the wall is a hand-colored black & white photo of an Egyptian Obelisk relocated to Paris during the Napoleonic Era. I picked this up at the 2004 Fort Worth Main Street Art Festival, the artistic highlight of the year here in Fort Worth. The art fair is held the middle weekend in April, so if you are in town, you should try to visit it! |
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Next up is my theater room. This is the view from the doorway. With the flash from the camera lighting up the highly reflective 119" screen, it is difficult to see much else in the room. However with the lights off and a movie up on the screen, this is what the room looks like most of the time. I painted the whole wall behind the screen black and with the lights out, the image on the screen seems to just float in space. |
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Here is a view of the area to the right of the screen or the southwest corner of the room. In the lower left corner of the photo you can see my dual monitor computer set-up. It is on a swing arm attached to the wall and swings out in front of the sofa. In the old days I had a big computer desk, but it took up a lot of space. Now I just stretch out on the sofa with the keyboard in my lap. Plus I am now facing both my theater screen and computer monitors at once this way. |
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The artwork in my theater room is all movie/TV/comics related. On the right in this close-up is a poster from the TV show 'Terminator: The Sarah Connors Chronicles'. On the left are an assortment of Supergirl artwork I found on the internet which I printed and framed. |
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This is a view of the east wall of the room. Wow, do I have a lot of DVDs. In ten years I have accumulated about 500, which works out to about one per week. Oh well, I guess there are a lot more expensive hobbies out there. |
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This is a print of Faith from 'Buffy the Vampire Slayer' by artist Jo Chen. |
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Here is a close-up of the stuff on the upper shelves of the DVD cases as well as the prints on the wall above. It was a real pain trying to get all of the frames to line up. |
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Here is another view from a different angle. The wood plaque in the center is for the patent I obtained many years ago. |
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This angle shows the entrance into my theater room. On the easel in the doorway is the
'Aakre Family Tree' chart that I created. It
covers my family history from the year 1200 to the year 2000. If you click
on the link above, you can access the Excel spreadsheet from which it was
created. (If you are using Internet Explorer, select 'open' in the menu box that
will appear to open the spreadsheet in your browser window.) If you move
your cursor over the beginning of a person's name, a box will pop up with more
detailed information about that person. The spreadsheet is very large, so
you will have to scroll around to see all of it.
A cousin of mine did all of the research, I just reformatted it into this style. Since I created it back in 2000, my cousin has continued to do more research. He has now traced one branch back to 800 AD and has connected our family to the first King of Norway. Hmmm, there probably aren't more than a million people between me and the throne of Norway and I am suddenly having visions from the movie 'King Ralph'. |
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This is a view of the other back corner of my theater room. Behind the sofa are two computers. The first is hooked up to the pair of monitors on the swing arm and is used for surfing the internet and other normal computer tasks. The second is hooked up to the projector you can see in the right of the photo sitting on top of the equipment rack. The computer is primarily used as a DVR for storing high definition TV shows. It is also used to display my personal photos up on the big screen - sort of like the old slide projector we had when I was a kid. |
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Here's a close-up of my print from the movie 'Underworld' to close out the set from my theater room. Kate Beckinsale in black leather - wow! |
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The guest bathroom. |
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The guest bedroom on the third floor. The walls still look a little bare. This concludes the pictures inside the house. |
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This is view of the back of the house from across the fjord. (Ok, most people would call it a channel but those of us of Norwegian descent use the more accurate term fjord which means a narrow inlet of water between steep slopes) From this angle you can see all of the decks on the backside. The uppermost deck is off of the master bedroom. The next is on the main floor of the house. The third level has another large deck. The lowest level is on the water where you can pull up a boat. |
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Close up of the upper levels in back. |
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Close up of the lower levels in back showing the water frontage. |
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A more recent picture of the landing below my deck with the jet skis and the hoist I installed. Very convenient, at least when the water level in the lake is high enough to access my channel. |
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This is what the channel behind my house looks like when the lake is 'full'. However, in six and a half years I have only seen it close to this level a grand total of about four months. |
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The highest water I have seen since living here occurred on Wednesday June 9, 2004. Four days earlier the lake had been over four feet low. However twelve inches of rain in a week was enough to raise the water level by seven and a half feet to the level you see here. |
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This is a sample of the other extreme. In August 2000 the lake was down a little over ten feet and the channel behind my house was dry, dry, dry. |
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A view of the lake from the main floor deck looking north. From here the area has a Californian feel rather than Texan. |
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A view of the back of the house from the deck on the main floor level. The doors enter into the living room. The windows to the right of the barbecue are in the dining room. |
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A view of the front of the house. The house is located on a short street that runs out onto a point allowing water access on both sides of the street. All of the houses on this street are required to have similar tan brick and blue roof styling. However the 21 houses are each custom built and unique on the inside. |
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The street includes a community pool and a private marina. This photo is a close up of the community pool and spa. The pool and marina are on the other side of the street and about four houses down from my house. The final photo below is a panoramic view of the lake when standing by the pool. It was created by 'stitching' five digital photos together. |
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