The New House (FInally!)

And now, presentinggggggg....

die Gurke Schloss!

Come on in!

 Please excuse the mess.  We just moved, you know.

To the right is our living room, with entrances to the kitchen and dining room visible in the background.

 

 It's very roomy, with plenty of space for everyone to sit, finally!  Behind the sofa is an electric fireplace, which is currently being used as a home shrine until we decide what else to do with it.  (I'd love to have the rest of the wall for bookcases.)

The dining room (apologies for the lousy lighting -- I admit I was more focused on the light coming from outside).  There is an awning that extends over the deck -- it's great for dinner time when the sun is shining in everyone's faces.

 Okay, back to the front door, and on our left is the den.

 Yes, that is a wall-mounted TV.  The previous owners didn't want to have to bother with moving it to Texas, so they left it.  They also left the leather reclining sofa pictured above.

 Okay, so on to the kitchen!

 The layout is very similar to our old kitchen, with just slightly more counter space (yay!) and a huge island (yay!). ( Since this photo we've moved the island closer to the counters.)

 

At first I wasn't sure if I liked the french door fridge, but I have to admit it's growing on me.  It's not designed for kids -- all the fridge shelves are up so high -- but they do like the "magic water" dispenser.

The view from my kitchen window often has a monkey hanging from the tree.

Back to the hallway; to the left is a half bath and the door to......

 ...the laundry/mud room!!  *angels singing*

View from the laundry room window.  This is such a happy place to be.

Side door entrance.  The driveway is always littered with bikes and trikes and scooters.  We haven't run over any of them, yet.

Okay, coming in from the laundry room, standing in front of the half bath and looking towards the front door, we see the basement door in front of us.  The door on the right is the other entrance into the den.

 

I don't have many shots of the basement -- it's big and cavernous and unfinished, but has massive amounts of storage space.  We hope to finish one half of it in a few years for a rec room.

What possesses someone to purchase 30+ large plastic storage bins... and then not use them??

Okay, back upstairs where it's not so cold....

 We have pulled several children off the outside of this railing -- it just BEGS to be climbed.

 At the top of the stairs to the left is the Master Suite, aka Sanctum Sanctorum.

 Lovely bright corner for the nursing chair.

 And the ultimate luxury... our OWN bathroom!!!  Ahhhhh...

(btw, what does it mean when florescent lights start flickering annoyingly after being on for a minute?)

 This is what sold the house for me, I think: a bedroom with 2 entrances, one of which is to the master bedroom.  Could this be anything else but a nursery?

The view down the hallway.  First door on the left is the baby's room, then the kids' bathroom; first door on the right is the boys' room, followed by the girls' room.  The playroom is straight ahead.

 The kids' bathroom with... *drumroll*

...double sinks!

There is also a *pink* bathtub, which I neglected to photograph.

 The boys' room.  (Remember how small their old room was?)

When he's awake, Daniel loves jumping off the end of Joseph's bed frame.  From below it sounds like he's going to come through the ceiling.

 The girls picked this room out as theirs right away.  It is so bright and pretty.  They were actually all unpacked & moved in the first day. :)

Finally, the playroom!  I have since removed the blue curtains, which has brightened up the room considerably (you can't tell from the picture, but it's actually a pretty dark room).

When we first started considering this house seriously, I initially balked because it didn't have a functioning basement.  I am a firm believer in having a special place where I can kick the kids when they're getting on my nerves for the children to play.  It was Mr. Pickles who reminded me that we would have a WHOLE EXTRA BEDROOM which has turned out to be the perfect play place!  PLUS, they also play in the basement anyway -- there are dress-up clothes scattered everywhere from several stagings of fashion shows.

I'm sorry I don't have any pictures of the yard -- it became a comedy of errors.  The camera ran out of storage, then once I emptied it the battery died and I couldn't find a charger, and then once we bought a new charger I haven't had any time to run out and take pictures when the lighting is good.  There is a lot to photograph though -- the previous owners told us they wanted a "wilderness retreat" in their backyard.  Well, it's certainly very wilderness-y!  I think we will be doing some hacking next spring.  (Think: machete.) (Or: flame thrower.)

We are gradually getting more settled in -- we haven't held the home blessing yet.  I want to hang pictures first -- I will feel like we are really moved in then. :)  It's actually a little embarrassing looking through these pictures -- I took them a couple weeks ago, and have cleaned up a lot since then. 

It's been interesting finding new places for things -- as small as our old house was, it had several convenient places for storing things that now we have lost.  So we've had to reshuffle our thinking a bit.  It's also forcing us to declutter as we unpack, which is a good thing.

As for the house itself, we just love it.  The previous owners took SUCH good care of it -- we shouldn't have to worry about anything for a little while at least.  We've had a couple adventures so far -- the first couple days here we froze, b/c the A/C was turned really low and we couldn't figure out how to adjust the thermostat!  Then one night I woke up around 4am to the sound of water running all through the house.  After a few disoriented minutes of wandering around the house trying to find the pipe that had burst, we realized the automatic sprinklers had turned on and had no idea how to turn them off.  (A week later I found the controls.)  Also, I learned an essential lesson about always, always, always making sure the laundry sink (into which the washer drains) is completely empty before starting a load.  The upside to the ensuing flood was that the mud room floor got really, really clean.

So far all the neighbors we've met have been lovely people.  Our next-door neighbor is a pastor at a local church and has been super-helpful and giving.  One of his daughters is Katie's age, so they are practically inseparable.  There are two little boys across the street, and another homeschooling family around the corner.  Everyone we've spoken with expressed gratitude that our family had moved into this house.  It's been so refreshing being so welcomed!

So there you have it!  

 

Thanks for visiting!  Don't forget to tip your docent!

Final Home Before & After: Bedrooms

Before I do a big reveal of the new place, I wanted to finish off the before & after series from the old (sniff! sniff!) house.  Somewhere in the chaos of the last few weeks I realized that I hadn't done the show & tell for the bedrooms yet.  So I'm going to make you wait (bwa ha haa) while I satisfy my unaccountable need to finish one thing before starting another.

I had a hard time finding good "before" pictures.  One doesn't usually go around just taking random pictures of one's bedrooms, you know?  Here's a taste of what it was like, though.

Master Bedroom

 Before

Okay, I admit, this tells you very little about the actual bedroom.  But look how cute Andy is!

Ahem.  Anyway, please note the random storage boxes on the floor in the background, and the white metal rack just full of... stuff.

After Staging

oooooo... breakfast in bed, anyone?  (all that food was fake, btw)

that vanity made such a good changing table!  (do you see the diaper pail which we tried, unsuccessfully, to hide?)

 The Real After

ahhh.  This really was a delightful room.  Very bright.  We actually only just bought that bed frame this year, can you believe it?  Craig's List is my new best friend.

 You can see the creaminess of the new paint.  WAY better than scratched-up, dulled white.

speaking of brightness... because we removed our sad, sad fleece curtains for staging, and took a while to replace them with blinds, we had to move the baby's bed into a darker area for naptimes.

The Bathroom

Our upstairs had one bathroom.  It had two doors: one from the hallway, one from the master bed, to the right of the vanity counter.  I couldn't find any good "before" pictures, and honestly, it's a bathroom, so there wasn't too much we did there except clear the shelves and hide everything in the linen closet.

The funny story about this picture, however, is that the morning of the photo shoot, half the outlets upstairs and all the lights in the bathroom just... stopped working.  The fuse had blown, and refused to be switched back on.  So our "shazam" picture of the bathroom, which has no windows, was taken without the benefit of any artificial lighting:

thank goodness for tripods!

A good friend who's an electrician suggested we check the outlets upstairs for any damage.  I remembered accidentally dropping one of the boys' beds on top of one of the floor outlets (in our townhome, there were no outlets in the walls shared with the neighboring house, so we had two outlets in the floor -- one in the dining room and one in the boys' room).  So Mr. Pickles opened the outlet up, aaaand... a wire had melted and fused and look horrible and creepy.  Once he replaced the socket, everything worked fine.  Thank goodness for automatically tripping fuses!

The Real After

with lights! and freshly painted ceiling -- Mr. Pickles had scraped off the peeling popcorn ceiling months and months ago, and primed it, but hadn't finished painting until the week before the Open House.  Oh. my. goodness. did that paint smell!  I am so grateful for low-odor paint!

We didn't paint the kids' rooms -- we figured why bother, since they're going to be repainted by the new owners anyway, and heck, they're kid rooms!  Of course they're a little beaten up!  Who cares!  When we first moved in, what became the girls' room was a bright electric blue, and the boys' room was yellow with an ancient shag carpet.  We used both as storage until we needed them for bedrooms.

The Girls' Room


Again with the lousy "before":

you get the general idea: mess.

After Staging

ahhhh. (the "staging team" -- which was our realtor and her family -- put these plastic cones under the girls' bed to raise it up off the floor so it looked a little less ghetto)

 The Real After

back to mess... but still, less cluttered.  Katie actually enjoyed keeping their room tidy.

a place for everything....

The Boys' Room

Before 

This room was crammed.  Jojo's bed takes up a lot of space.  You can see a corner of Daniel's bed in the lower right -- he was practically against the closet doors.

This is actually from over a year ago, before we put the frames in the boys' room.  I only included it because CUTE!

  After Staging

of COURSE the decals picked that week to start falling off the walls!

 The (mostly) Real After

I should have left Joseph's bed out for display -- we had him on an air mattress for a month, so we could roll it up and hide it in case someone needed to come over.  His pillow and doggy are there in the corner though.  His bed actually was against the closet doors, so whenever he rolled over we heard this loud metallic banging coming from their room.

So there you have it!  It's weird to think that's all gone now.  The last few days before the move were very bittersweet. 

And the new owners have already repainted.

But what really made us feel "moved out" was when Mr. Pickles cut the jump rope out of the dogwood tree.  Then we really knew we didn't live there anymore.

sigh... so long, Gurkehaus!  You were good to us.

Pickles Update

Well, we moved!  And survived!

...so far.  But I'm getting really, REALLY tired of hearing myself say, "Oh look!  Here [x] is!" only to say a short time later, "Hm.  I wonder where [x] went."  Which explains why we have no pictures of the move because the camera has been resurfacing (when not needed) and hiding itself (when wanted) for the last several days.  But it will turn up!  Eventually!

Unpacking your house is like going on a treasure hunt.  Sure, you labeled the boxes, but only with the major items, so who knows what other countless small items you stuffed in a box at the last minute before you taped it up?  I actually have a large box labeled "random crap from closet" because really there was no other way to label it.


So this is just to let you all know that we are alive, we have unpacked essentials like shampoo and liquor, everyone has a bed to sleep on (with sheets!)  and I have actually done a couple loads of laundry.  And I went grocery shopping, so we have food to eat now.  I think Andy was getting a little tired of oatmeal for 4 days in a row.

More details when I can feel less guilty about spending time on the internet. (i.e., when I can find a chair from which I can't see any unpacked boxes.)

Home Before & After: Basement

First off, the big news (for those who haven't heard it yet): we found another house!!  We are so happy.  It's huge and beautiful.  The home inspection was a week ago, and it was about as perfect as you could expect.  The owners have taken amazing care of the house -- they've put a lot of themselves into it.  I imagine it's going to be hard for them to leave it -- as hard as it's going to be for us to leave this house!  Anyway, we couldn't be happier with the new house.  Now it's time to start packing!

Before that, here are some more Amazing House Transformation pictures of the basement. I'm ordering these slightly differently from the last post: we'll look at one section at a time to compare.

This is the first view of the basement when you come down the stairs: the play area.

Before

 I don't have any zowie! shots of that area, so here is our real after:

ahhh...

 The official "rec room" part:

 Before:

yes, it really did always look like this.  even when the kids "cleaned"

 with staging:

actual conversation at the open house: "Wow.  How is that flat screen TV connected?" Realtor: "...It's not."

 REAL after:

THERE'S the real TV

 I wish I had a "before" shot of the game & puzzle shelves, to contrast with this staged photo:

Daniel was thoroughly depressed when he first came in and saw all the games missing

 the Real After:

that is as tidy as I can humanly make that area.  and that's after clearing out about half of what was there before.

Now, the dungeon!  Aka Home Office/Laundry/Utility Room:

 

this was actually quite tidy, since at the time we had cleared some space to receive the new washer & dryer

old washer & dryer

I could never find stuff on those shelves

Now, the reason there's no staged shot of this area is b/c it was piled up with boxes full of stuff they wanted to hide.  So here's the Real After:

such plush carpeting!  and order! and easy-to-findness! (just don't ask me to open the computer cabinet)

a place for everything, and everything in its place!

Of course, as I write this, the laundry room floor is covered with sorted laundry, the couch cushions are off the couch, there is a huge tent made of scarves and cloaks and about 97 million clothes pins, and there are legos all over the floor.

Here, lemme just show you:

the REAL Real After

But!  It cleans up so quickly!

And that *is* a pretty cool tent.