Several people have expressed an interest in seeing the rest of the house besides the garage. Leave it to a man to only post pictures of the garage! My last post showed the front room, but now I will show you the rest of the house. I am breaking it into two posts, roughly the downstairs and the upstairs, since I have quite a few pictures.
Here is the view of the front of the house from the
culdesac. The lot and driveway slope up from the street. The garage and driveway are two cars wide. With our trailer, I am sure missing our 4-car wide driveway with 60+ feet of concrete beside the house and behind the front gate. But I am thankful for at least a two car heated garage. I won't take that for granted come winter.
Being on a sloped lot means stairs. The first set of stairs up to the front door.
The view coming up to the front door of the front porch area. The window to the left is from the front room.
The entry way as you step in the front door. Please forgive the boxes of books. We are unpacking after all! If you turn left you will go into the front room. To the right is the staircase to the upstairs. The little bit of mirror that you see in front of the stairs is the mirrored door to the coat closet. You can walk in front of the coat closet and through to the hallway that leads to the bathroom, laundry and garage. If you continue straight from the front door you will come to the family room.
The view into the front room from the entryway.
The coat closet at the bottom of the stairs. You can see Sierra on her bed in the reflection.
From the entryway looking up the stairs to the second floor landing. The little bit of blue at the top is the boys' bathroom. Beside it is a linen closet and a big mirrored closet. On the lower level directly below the boys' bathroom is the first floor powder room. The rabbit hutch tucks in under the stairs when she is inside.
View from the bottom of the stairs.
Behind and under the stairs is a great area for playing with
legos. There is even a light under there!
If you walk straight from the front door you come into the family room. This picture is taken from the kitchen area. You can see into the powder room behind.
Here is the family room as you walk in from the front door. It is hard to tell in the picture, but this is really too much furniture to fit comfortably in this room. We may have to replace the recliners with bean bag chairs for the boys or rethink the arrangement. The glass door goes out on to the back deck.
This is the downstairs powder room.
Further down the same hallway is the laundry. The door goes out to the garage.
Other side of laundry. I am still working on how to arrange things the best. I have no bar to hang clothes, which is really throwing me for a loop. I am trying to figure out how to add one in somewhere.
From the family room, if you turn left, you go into the kitchen area. Here is the view from the couch in family room.
Kitchen windows look out on deck and back yard. There is a small kitchen eating area, but not really big enough for a table. I am looking for some sort of small table or bakers cart that can have a couple of stools at it for this area. For the next set of pictures I am going to basically stay in one spot and pivot around the kitchen.
Kitchen sink. Forgive the mess. Not sure it is ever completely cleaned up.
Pivot slightly to the left for view of center of kitchen. The door by the refrigerator leads into the dining room and front room. Next to the fridge are double wall ovens.
Pivot left some more and there is a desk area and small pantry closet. I am loving the desk area in the kitchen! Too bad it is the worst spot in the house for
wi-
fi and phone reception.
Pivot left again and we almost complete the circle looking from the kitchen out into the family room.
This picture shows one thing that I love and one thing that I hate about my new kitchen. Can you guess what they are? The thing I love is the gas cook top. It is taking some getting used to, but I really prefer using gas to cook. The thing I hate is that there is absolutely no extra counter space beyond the cook top itself.
This is heading out of the kitchen into the dining room.
Here is the dining room. Despite being a separate room, it is so close in proximity to the kitchen that it really is no trouble at all to eat all our meals here. In fact I think the fridge is closer to this table than at our old house. Of course, if the fridge door is open you can't go through the door between the dining room and kitchen; but that hasn't been too much of a problem so far.
I am taking this picture from the front room. The dining room is elevated two steps from the front room but otherwise there is no other divider between the rooms. The glass door also leads out onto the deck.
This is basically the ground floor. The next post will show you the upstairs.
By "getting back to normal" I do not mean that we have unpacked everything, settled in, and found a routine. What I do mean is that every nook and cranny of this new house is starting to be covered with Legos, which was pretty much par for the course at our old house.
The new twist is that this house has an upstairs landing that overlooks the front room. And it was only a matter of time before the boys used it to their advantage with Lego contraptions.
Yesterday the boys decided to build a "Lego amusement park" in the front room. Here is the kid's climbing wall and a ride.
Closer view of the ride - looks to me like a "tilt-a-whirl". Man I loved those things when I was a kid - and I can't imagine a much worse torture now as an adult.
Here they are working on the major attraction of the park - a Lego zip line from the upstairs landing!
Now you can see the zip line. The top red yarn is the zip line. It has a lego and paperclip contraption to attach the lego people. Conner is holding onto the bottom red yarn which is tied to a paperclip "hook" to pull the contraption back up to the top again. It really was a pretty good engineering feat!
Here Conner is using the pulley system on the zip line. You can also see the fireplace in the front room and also about all the decorating that I have done so far. I have one picture hung! Woo-hoo! Chris is also rolling all over the open floor as we do not have any furniture in this room yet. We paired down our furniture when we moved and so this room will have to be empty for a while. (Notice the white carpet? The people we got the house from also have 2 boys. Who puts white carpet down with 2 boys? I have visions of berry smoothies or red kool-aid being dropped on this floor. Needless to say, such items are banned from this room.)
These are the windows across the front of the house in this room. Chris is a whirling dervish on the floor.
