Our House

A few have been asking to see some pictures of our house, so here goes...

I'm always hesitant to put pictures up until I have everything exactly the way I want it, but I don't know if that will ever happen, so whatever. We're going on our 4th year now of being "temporary" and it's getting a little old. I was feeling really sad for a few days after we got here because I just want to be able to buy a house again and make it our own. I AM a "homemaker" after all! Every time we've moved in the last three years, we've had a specific expiration date and it's made me not want to spend any time/money on a place we're just renting for a short time. Well, I'm over that, so I'm just going to pretend we're settled here...for a year. I know it doesn't make any sense, but it makes me feel better. One good thing about moving so often is I feel an urgency to get everything set up quickly so I can enjoy it for as long as possible. (And since I'm not the one packing and moving us, I don't feel a need to just leave everything in boxes).

Anyway, moving on...here's our house! The bottom floor is basically one big box broken up into four quadrants. This picture shows the front door on the right and the "formal living room" I guess. On the left is just a half wall with cut-out things that separates it from the family room. We're so grateful to be on the end unit so we have lots of windows!! I should also mention how nice it is to have colored walls again. While I would probably never choose this particular color to paint my house, I much prefer it to the bright white that is usually the standard in so many rental properties!

This picture below is from standing in the above picture. This is our dining room. It's completely open to the living room. On the right you can see the half wall that separates it from the kitchen. In between the two half walls is open, to walk into the kitchen/family room. And on the left is a hallway that leads to a half bath on the left, then stairs down to the basement, a large closet on the right, and then a door to the garage. The owners used this dining room to store their treadmill, and it just had a little weak-sauce ceiling light with little depressingly blue-ish LED lights in it where the chandelier now is. I'm so glad the property manager finally came to put the chandelier back in (as he promised to do before we moved in). It makes a world of difference in there!

 It's nice to have a lot of space for our table so we can easily expand it when we have people over. (I really need to repaint that mirror a darker color...)

Now if you stand in that walkway/in-between the two half walls you see this. We have our desk and computer here in between the kitchen and family room. That slider door leads out to our little back patio and "yard" (common area).

 And then to the right is the family room. It has a gas fireplace, but there's no glass, just a little metal curtain thing, so I doubt we'll ever use it. That valance was here when we got here. I still have the receipts for the ottoman and the pillows...not sure how I feel about all of them yet. (I love the style of the ottoman, just not the color...)

And then to the left is the kitchen! I love the look of the kitchen, but I don't know why on earth they don't have an island with all that space! Sigh. Some of the townhomes do (along with granite countertops), so I guess we're in the cheap model. Haha. Oh well. Luckily the cabinets are very tall, so I can actually fit quite a bit in here, but my counter space is pretty limited. I've definitely had worse though! And again, only being here a year, I'm not going to get a portable island. I do love having the little kid table in here though. The kids draw and paint and often eat lunch in here or a snack while I'm doing things in the kitchen. (By the way, the movers broke our old smaller kid table so we got that table you see at Ikea and it's actually a coffee table. So much cheaper than the actual kid tables and the perfect size! Ha! Take that Ikea!)

 And to keep things real, this is more what it usually looks like...

That's our downstairs! The upstairs isn't too exciting as far as pictures go. It's very spacious and nice though. The boys' bedroom is over the garage and very big. It has two big windows and a nice wide closet. Then there's a large laundry closet, a bathroom for the kids, Anna's big room with two windows and a huge closet, and our master bedroom with a walk-in closet and bathroom. I don't have anything on the walls in the bedrooms, just a couple things in the hallways, so it's pretty bare up there, but it's very functional! I want to do a big picture wall up there. I have several family pictures I don't have a place for downstairs and more that I want to print out and frame, so I thought that would be fun. And I could easily transfer them to another wall in a different house next year!

Oh, and we also have a two-car garage and an unfinished basement. We finally cleaned up and organized both of those last Saturday and it is so nice! That was the last moving-in thing we needed to do. Jeremy spent a long time sweeping and vacuuming up lots of dirt, bugs and spider webs and it's a much more usable space now! I organized all the bins and storage and now we're not afraid to go down there. This is our first time ever having a basement, and I'm always so amazed at how cool it is down there! Wow, it's nice.

 This is where we'll be getting our exercise this winter! And yes, our washer and dryer are down here. The owners left theirs in the laundry closet so we're using them while we're here and saving ours! Besides the fact that we scorched our clothes the first load because they had the water heater turned up all the way and the hot and cold hoses mixed up (seriously???), they've worked out very well...

So there you go! Thanks for looking! And come visit us!