Exterior view from the north side of the building (Elm Street). The picture is kind of dark, but it looks like I'm goofing around with the front door or something. I didn't get around to carving our pumpkins this year. Pathetic, I know.
Photo by Batman, 12 Nov 2002.
View from the northwest. You can see some structural bracing in the corner of the porch from the in-progress porch repair. (That will have its own web page.) That's also why there is lattice-work resting against the foundation.
A fun thing to notice: the short, horizontal window on the second floor (partially obstructed by the tree) is actually in front of a brick chimney, so it doesn't exist inside. Similarly, the right-hand quarter-circle window in the attic is also blocked by the chimney. They are purely decorative.
Photo by Batman, 12 Nov 2002.
View from the northeast. This shot really shows off the "asymmetric massing" characteristic of Queen Anne Victorians. There is very little bilateral symmetry in the house; instead, many of the house structures come in threes, usually three parts of unequal size or shape. This is angle provides by far the fanciest views of the house. (It's the side visible when walking to the house from downtown Oberlin.)
This photo also shows one of our three monster maple trees. Unfortunately they are monster maples with multiple trunks; this makes them considerably weaker than a tree of similar age with one trunk. We had a lot of work done on this one in the winter of 2000-2001; hopefully it will be a little more stable now.
Photo by Batman, 12 Nov 2002.
Another shot from the same angle, a little further back.
There are two young ash trees on our treelawn. (I'd never heard the term "treelawn" until I moved to Ohio. It's the strip of land between the sidewalk and the street.) By stroke of luck, the electric power lines run behind our house, rather than above the treelawn as they are sited on the other blocks of Elm Street. Due to the neverending war between the power company and the trees, most of the trees on Elm Street are looking pretty sad these days. Things are only going to get uglier as the oldest trees (which are older than the power lines, and therefore above the fray) die off.
Anyway, we have these two ash trees which are growing quite fast. I believe they are pumpkin ashes, but ashes are notoriously difficult to identify. I finally got up the nerve to whack the lesser co-dominant trunk in the foreground ash in Jan 2002; I should have done it a year ago.
Photo by Batman, 12 Nov 2002.
View of the house from the south. It's interesting that the southern exposure has so few windows compared with the northern exposure. Of course a big part of this is that the north side of the house is the formal, street-side of the house while the back is, well, the back. But one has to wonder if the overall Victorian penchant for the dark (dark wood, dark wallpaper, dark trim paint) extended to window layout also.
It must be said that those north-facing windows really do have the gentle, indirect "writer's light" that would probably be a lot better for my computer-programming needs than the south facing window I set up next to.
Photo by Batman, 12 Nov 2002.
Another view from the southeast. It'll be fun to compare this with another shot in a few years, after the various trees and shrubs we've planted have grown in a bit.
Photo by Batman, 12 Nov 2002.