A History of the Changes to 10601 Barker Ridge Cove

This blog is a history of the construction and remodeling work done on the house at 10601 Barker Ridge Cove. There are a number of purposes for recording this information:

1. It should be useful to know what was done and why, as the house ages and we make more and more changes to it.
2. It may be helpful to know when some particular work was done.
3. I expect it will be helpful for tax purposes. Initially I was keeping a written log of the changes made to the house in a blank book, including pricing. The expectation is that if/when the house is eventually sold, it's basis price will be of use. The initial basis price was the price paid when we bought it. Improvements to the house increase that basis price. The profit for the house is the eventual sales price minus the basis price. A change in the tax code meant that if the profit from the house is less than $250K (for a single) or $500K (for a couple), it was tax free. As long as we expected the profit to be less than these numbers, we didn't even need to keep the records for the basis. For more than 20 years, this has been the case -- no prospect that an eventual sales price would generate much more than the initial purchase price. So I let the record keeping lapse. Now, however, it does not seem impossible, particularly with the expected higher inflation from the ballooning deficits of the Bush and Obama administrations. So it seems prudent to continue the recording of changes made to the house.

As a start, this log will not then be in real-time. Initially, we will enter data from the past 20+ years, since the construction of the house in 1986. Eventually, we should catch up with the current day, and then improvements should be contemporaneous with the work.