It has come to my attention (quite a long while ago... but we won't talk about that :-) ) that we have not described our house here in the blog and that you all would enjoy getting a tour of sorts. Recall what I said in May about me being deadline motivated?? We are leaving on Friday this week... so here I am with the tour. :-)
We live out of the center of town in a suburb on the north side. We are not very far from downtown in a car, but it can take awhile with public transportation. The location has been perfect for us since Jason is only a 20 minute walk from work - and in spite of the heat now, he is still walking to work. This has helped us b/c we thus only need 1 car. Katie's school is not walking distance, but it is only 10 minutes in the car w/o traffic. Our house could best be described as a town home, tho here they tend to call it a chalet (and how much fancier that sounds!). We share a walk w/ our next door neighbor.
Our house is 3 levels, and is rather long and thin like you would imagine a town home would be. You enter on the middle level where the kitchen, dining room and living room are. The furniture in the living room is mostly ours from home, but the side tables, dining room table & hutch are not ours.
The house was left furnished, so we have a strange mix of the owner's stuff and our stuff. :-) This even extends to the pictures on the wall: he left quite a few pictures for us, but he has rather different taste than we do, so mostly our smallish pictures are what's on the walls :-). In this last pic, the front door is in front of you and the kitchen is off to the left.
The kitchen is rather tiny, so there is only a very small table in there. So we either eat outside on the back porch, or at the dining room table. We have invested in an IKEA serving tray that comes in handy to reduce the number of trips back and forth from the kitchen!! We also bought an IKEA kitchen island (I think that's the best way to describe it) that we have against the other wall of the room. It really helped b/c before we had only the counter space you can see in these pics - minus the space for the toaster and microwave! So now the toaster and microwave are on the other side of the room and it is very helpful :-). The fridge is very different - rather tall and thin.
We've been surprised how much we enjoy eating outside. It dawned on me a couple of weeks ago - when you don't have A/C, you can eat inside where it's hot or you can eat outside where it's hot but there's a breeze. So mostly the Spanish eat outside. (they also LOVE the heat!) And it's very dry here so even though it's hot, you're usually not dripping sweat when you're sitting still. Anyway, we have gotten a lot of use out of our table on the terraza. Thankfully our owner left us all this great outdoor furniture! I forgot to take a pic of the terraza since we've lived here - but this is one from before we moved in.
Upstairs are 3 bedrooms and 2 baths. We did bring our bed and 1 nightstand, but it's probably good that we didn't bring any of our other bedroom furniture b/c it wouldn't fit :-). Our bed is really tall compared to Spanish beds so when they 1st brought it it took us by surprise. But we are soooo glad we brought it!! Notice the most attractive thing in our bedroom: the beautiful A/C unit on the wall! Katie's room and the office are right next to each other down the hall from our room. (the window you can see in both pics is actually connected to each other outside) Notice that they haven't quite finished the A/C job... oh well :-) At least our sleeping rooms are done!
And BTW - the house is sooo much cooler now - the upstairs A/C ends up pushing the coolness down through the middle level as well. And the basement is basically underground, so it stays cool on its own.
Finally, all the way downstairs is the guest room/suite :-). I say suite b/c, while everything upstairs is rather compact, the downstairs rooms are really big! The owner had recently converted the garage to a guest room and extra living area. So it's really new, modern and nice. I don't think these pics are doing it justice... but hopefully they give you a little glimpse :-). Connecting these 2 rooms in the pic is a HUGE walk through closet that looks like it came straight from the Container Store! We wish that we could use this room as our master (as the owner was doing), but it's too far away from Miss Katie. (and we really do like our cozy little space upstairs!) So we use it as the playroom and guest room instead - and you get to enjoy all the space if you come see us! :-) And we'll try to get the rest of the pics on the wall down there before you come :-).
Becca :-)
Georgia and Isaac helping stock the shelves. (They honestly did almost all the work!)
Martin and Eliza having a look at the books available. Lots of room on the shelves... so hopefully we continue to get donations!
