Your name:	Marie
City:	Fremont
State:	CA
Closest metropolitan area:	San Francisco
Occupation:	Senior Software Engineer for Quicken.com
Teammate's name:	Daniel
Teammate's relationship to you:	Spouse
Occupation:	Homemaker and Retired Computer Tech

 

Distance and directions between houses?

26 ft from wall to wall. We’re right next door to each other.

Room to be transformed

Family Room

Measurements

20’ x 14’

Why have you chosen this room?

It's definitely our most challenging room. First, it is used for many functions and a wide range of ages. Second, it has almost no wall space. Third, it has many competing decorating elements from mismatched furniture to an elegant handcrafted fireplace.

However, our original idea was that we'd ask you to do the same room in both houses and see how different designers would transform identical spaces. If you like that idea, we could be talked into doing the same room as Mike & Ken.

Do you own your home?

Yes

When was your home built?

1979

What style is your home?

Contemporary Tri-level with typical late 70s architecture and floor plans

Who else lives with you?

Our son Matthew, who is 10.5. He loves Star Wars, collecting Pokemon cards, and Harry Potter. Right now he's obsessed with designing his own video game.

Our daughter Maggie is 3.5 and charms the pants off everyone who meets her in spite of the fact that she's a bit of a hellion. For example, she loves to use our drapes to rappel down the walls when we're not looking (and sometimes even when we are).

Has either of you ever attempted any decorating or do-it-yourself projects?

Both Marie and Dan are handy with tools though neither is particularly crafty. Our first house was a bit of a fixer-upper and we spent every weekend for the first six months stripping wallpaper, painting inside and out, replacing door knobs, caulking sinks, cutting and laying linoleum, etc.

In our current house, Dan does all the small maintenance tasks himself (though we’ve gotten lazy and usually hire someone to do the big stuff) while Marie took most of the photographs on the walls.

In addition, Dan is into model railroading and has a fantastic O gauge setup in the garage that he built himself. He is now starting on a garden railroad (G Scale) in our backyard and musing about filling the driveway with trains as part of this year’s Christmas decorations.

Tell us a bit more about yourself (hobbies, interests, any funny stories!)

How our families became friends:

I love figure skating. I love to watch it, to photograph it and to do it. But when we first moved to this neighborhood, it was summer and I was five months pregnant. Figure skating, in any form, was the last thing on my mind.

In the meantime, we found the neighborhood to be very friendly, the sort of place where neighbors socialize together and look out for each other. We immediately became friends with our next door neighbor Mike whose daughter was almost exactly the same age our son. It seemed like we had a lot in common as we have similar parenting styles and similar jobs, but our friendship remained very casual and on the surface.

Until one day when I was complaining to another neighbor that I never seem to find the time to figure skate with a new baby in the house. That’s when I found out that Mike skates too and, not only that, but he and his ex-wife had skated competitively and were quite good. In fact, I later found out that Mike is so good that he was on the World Roller Skating team seven times before he switched to ice dancing.

Once Mike found out that I skated too, he was determined to get me to try ice dancing. I was not too keen on the idea at first because I thought I wasn’t a good enough skater to ice dance. But I was so excited to finally have a friend who loved skating as much as I did that I let him talk me into attending an ice dance session. With Mike helping me, I made great progress and last fall he even skated with me in an Ice Dance competition just for fun. (We came in last, which I’m used to, but he isn’t.)

Now, every week Mike and I drive around the Bay Area to various ice dance sessions, talking about all sorts of things from how to deal with work and parenting problems, to gossiping about our fellow skaters and neighbors.

But what we really love to talk about is our houses and how we should decorate them. We go to all the Open Houses in the neighborhood and dish about how they are decorated. We trade ideas and complain about our floor plans (which are very challenging). We sit in our houses — which are identical — and bounce ideas off each other.

There really isn’t any way I could have planned to buy a house next door to an accomplished ice skater where everyone in both families got along with so well that we consider ourselves practically family. It’s one of those things that, if you put it in a book or movie, would seem contrived. But that’s exactly what happened.

 

But wait, there’s more…

To find out even more about us, visit my web site at www.marie.org

Have you ever been on television before?

Marie was videotaped to be a "Quicken Tip" in an old version of Quicken for Mac -- does that count?

How did you hear about the program?

One night our whole family was over at Mike and Ken’s for swimming and dinner. They are big fans of the show and have started taping all the episodes. After dinner, they convinced us we should all watch the show together. It was the episode with Frank’s Mexican Kitchen and before it was even over we were hooked.

Now watching the show together has become a regular social occasion for both our families.