Greg Baugues and Rachel Lazelle Got Married

Before Rachel and I started looking at rental houses for our wedding, before we even had a destination in mind, we made a list describing our “dream home”.  Later that night we found Marty’s Place while searching HomeAway.com.

Here’s the list we came up with:

Exterior Requirements

• lots of greeen stuff — in a forest?
• big yard, or close to something similar where we can just walk out and do the ceremony
• gorgeous view.. perched up on a hill / mountain
• large body of water near by – lake / ocean
• deck / roof overlooking magnificient view
• more stars than I’ve ever seen in my life
• hot tub under the stars

Well, I don’t know about the stars, but we’ll be on a small island 90 miles outside of Seattle, so I like my chances.  Sadly, no hot tub.  Everything else… nailed it.

Interior

• 4+ BR 3+ Bath
• The sickest kitchen I’ve ever seen in a home
• Open, spacious interior areas.
• High ceilings in main living area
• Fire place

When they renovated Marty’s Place they built the kitchen for the purpose of catering for weddings.  Unfortunately, due to zoning restrictions, they can’t have more than 12 people on the premise at any time.  But the kitchen is fully stocked with three ovens, and two dishwashers.

Not only is there an interior fireplace, but a huge fire pit out back.  I never would have imagined something like that exists, let alone put it on the list.

John Gore says "That's not a firepit. That's a portal to Mordor."

I’m not sure how spacious the living area will be.  It doesn’t look like it has high ceilings.  They just didn’t build houses in 1909 with the same spacious excess that we do things with today.  Still, the owner said that if it’s raining and need to do the ceremony inside, we could take all the furniture out of the living room, which has a huge bay window overlooking the ocean, and all 11 of us would fit there no problem.   That’s big enough for me.

Location

• town within 30 minutes for groceries
• stuff to do: hiking, kayaking, etc
• 60 miles to major airport
• secluded… not in a neighborhood with a bunch of houses

We didn’t quite get this one.  Marty’s place is 90 minutes away from the Seattle Airport.  That’s okay, we’ll deal with it.

We’ll be four miles away from Langley, where the grocery store is.  They have all sorts of outdoor recreation available.  Five national state parks on the island.  Kayaking options.

Martys Place sits on five acres.  You can see below that there are some other houses in the area, but it is by no means densely populated (Marty’s Place is the one in the center with the rounded white porch)