More house history

Exchanged some emails with a Sacramento Mid Century blogger who runs Eichlerific. And she pointed me to this website that has vintage aerial photography.

We know that some major renovations have been done to the house, and I wrote about the garage addition earlier

There, I showed the current aerial photo with the estimated additions (the fuchsia squares below):

HistorialAerials.com  has aerial shots of our house from 1957 and 1964:

1957,  Notice the sparse trees and where the driveway is located




1964, Trees have grown in the last seven years:

Solving a mystery

So we had assumed that our house originally had a 2 car garage and that they took half of that garage and made it a part of the awesomely large kitchen. Last night, I crawled into the attic above the garage and found evidence otherwise:

That's an old exterior vent ----- this was the old outside of the home (there's one on the other side of the house too). So basically, what they did was took the one car garage, converted it into part of the kitchen. Then built a whole new garage and added it to the side of the house. 

Here's a bird's eye view ---- the pink boxes show the additions to the house:

The attic space above the garage was insulated with R-11 insulation (Energy Star recommends R-38 and higher is better). Bonus is that there was mostly plywood over that ---- so tons of Rubbermaid storage boxes of holiday decor could be relocated here!