Open House

I am probably the worst blogger in the world...and yet I carry on.  :)  I find that blogging is like any habit - the more you practice it, the more you want to do it more often.  But if you stop for awhile...then it's hard to get back into.  Anyway...I don't have anything pithy or even really interesting to say here.  Just getting tired of that easter picture in the previous post.   :)

Here's what I'm going to do.  I took some pictures of parts of our house because a long time ago the lovely Jennifer was bugging me to put some pictures of our new place up here.  So I will put them up :)

Welcome to our house.  This was taken back in October - so no leaves.  But luckily Carter is REALLY into taking pictures right now with our old camera (I'm not joking - we checked it the other day and there were OVER 700 on it) so he took the next picture out his bedroom window which shows you how lovely the tree in the front yard looks in the spring :)

This is what you see when you walk in through the front door.

If you turn around to hang up your coat (or to go back out if you changed your mind), then this is the view from there.  Stunning, right?  :)

But let's say you want to stay because you can smell something really good baking - like cookies.  So you turn back around.  Then go left and you will be in the living room.  Here I want to someday add some built in bookcases on either side of the fireplace, and a large area rug.  But for now the old hardwood is perfect for racing cars on and stuff like that.

Ok, so now turn around again and look back at the doorway into the living room (because the cookies smell good but not that good) and you will see this:  the rest of the living room.  And the stairs going up.

But don't leave yet.  Just turn to your left now, and then you will walk into the dining and kitchen area, where  you decide that you really do want to stay for a visit.  Good.  So now that you've finally made up your mind, we can enjoy the tour :)  This is the kitchen, obviously.

And now, if you look back toward the front of the house you can see both the living room and the entryway, with the dining room to your right.  I don't have a good picture of the dining room right now (and I don't think Carter did either, although in scanning through 700 pictures I could have missed one, hehe), but you know what's in there.  Table.  Chairs.  Piano against the far wall.  A couple plants.  Highchair.  That's about it.  Also in this picture you can see that if you go into the entry way hallway and turn left immediately there is a doorway, and that leads you to the purple room.  The purple room (aka family room/office) is going to be painted at some point, so that's all I'll say about that :)  Also back there is a laundry room and tiny bathroom and back door, which you will see from the outside in a moment.

Now if you head back to the front door (but you're not leaving yet, don't even try it), you can then go up the stairs.  The first room on the right once you get up there (14 steps, count 'em - Ok.  Sidebar.  Does anyone else count steps?  I admit that I often do.  Even when I already clearly know that there are 14.  It is very helpful when navigating the stairs at night, though.  Or if I went blind, then it would be extremely helpful. I could even pretend to be blind and do just fine on the stairs.  Not that I do that or anything...Jason says I am borderline OCD....nah, he's crazy.) is the bathroom.  :)  This is the best room of the house, thanks to the previous owners.  I take no credit.  There is this part, with cool sink and biggish shower that has great water pressure -

- and then there is this part, with jets.  And don't forget the heated tile floor.  Awesome.

The next room on your right is the green room, aka the master bedroom.  This also will be painted sometime :)  By the way, what do you do with an almost four-year-old and a twenty-one-month-old while painting?  Do it at night, is my guess.

There are also two rooms on the left side of the hallway.  One is the wrestling room  guest room/storage room, which I have no picture of but is a lovely shade of light blue.  I'm not being sarcastic.  I actually like that one.  And all the rest of the paint in the house, too.  Just not the purple room and the lime green one.  Oh, and then there's the tiny bathroom on the main floor which has butterflies and flowers wallpaper...well, the butterflies do come in handy when a one-year-old refuses to let his mom go to the bathroom without him also being in the room and he needs a distraction - find the butterflies amidst the flowers is a great game.  

Ahem.  The other room on the left is the boys' room.  It used to look kind of like this.

But now it has this crib instead of the playpen (which used to be the toddler bed but now that the toddler is out of said bed it has reverted to its original state):

And it also has this :)  Lots of excitement emanating from that room now.  And a bit of sleep deprivation too :)

Now let's head back downstairs (we'll skip the basement because it's kind of nasty) and out through the purple room and the laundry room and past the tiny butterfly bathroom (with the octagonal window) and oops, watch your step there.  Because the old, rotten, nails-sticking-out and holes-begging-to-be-tripped-in-and-cut-your-leg-open deck is gone.  :)  I don't think I have a good picture of how it all looked before but this next one shows you half of the deck anyway.  My, what a handsome construction worker.  :)

Back of house.  Men at work.

 And now we have this!  Which is a lot better than what used to be there, and will be even better once my handsome construction worker builds the new deck that he is scheming up.

So there you have it.  Now, if you like, you can leave :)  Or come back in for that cookie.