The new house

My grandma (GG) has requested more pictures of the new house and what GG wants, GG gets.  :)

Here is a sad picture of the outside I took with my phone for the adoption home study update.  We get to do that part over again since we've moved into a new house.  Yippee!  

 

The front yard is pretty big and goes even farther before you reach the street.  There is a covered front porch that you can't see very well because of the shadows.  

Here are the hand drawn floor plans (also for the home study update) that I thought might be helpful before I post a bunch of pictures.  

 

 

 

Now to the pictures.  Note:  most of the house is this tan color.  I don't know why it looks different in some picture but this first one is a good representation of it.  This is the front entry.  Like the hole in the wall there beneath my picture?  We had to have some electrical work done in the kitchen thanks to the previous owner's poor rendition of above-the-cabinet lighting and that was the only way to get access to it.  Someday it will be patched.  Hopefully someday soon.  

This is the piano room.  It's directly to the right when you walk in the front door. I finally have a place for the quilt Mom made for me.  :)

The adjoining room is the dining room/schoolroom:  

We painted another chalkboard wall since I cannot and will not live without one ever again. Can you see Sawyer's cute little scribbles along the bottom there?  That's as high as he can reach right now.  So cute.

 Just outside the dining room and leading to the big living room downstairs: 

On your left of the front door just opposite the piano room is the office.  It holds most of our extra school stuff, a few bits of my crafting stuff, the computers and printers and all the household documents/junk.  There is a lot crammed into the closet in there which is off to the right in this picture!  We painted this room a light gray color (same as the boys' room and media room upstairs) because it was this awful faux finished room that looked like a baby had smeared his diaper all over the walls.  Yuck-o.  

It has French doors that close it off and another door on the other side of the room that leads to the back hallway.  

Here is the living room downstairs.  The little niche is painted a very bright pea green (too bright for my taste but it's staying for now.) Sorry for the laundry but I took these pictures on chore day and Cash had just finishing folding the clothes.  :)  You can see all the pictures and things I still have yet to put up on the walls there by the fireplace.

This is the view of the kitchen if you are standing by the big windows in the living room.  It's also painted the same tan but it looks more golden in here.  I'm not going to say much about the kitchen because not very nice things will be written about it. It is a beautiful kitchen now with lots of storage space, but it's taken several hours of elbow grease (thank you for all the help, John, Mom, and Zulema) and air purifiers on 24 hours a day for the last several days to make it to where I could walk in it and not want to cry or say bad words.  Let's just say that we are not fans of the previous owners and their lack of cleaning and maintenance.  Or whatever crazy crap the lady cooked in here that left such an awful lingering smell and left the cabinets and floors looking so gross.  See - not nice things.  

The huge breakfast "nook" in the kitchen.  This is definitely one thing I love about this house.  There is plenty of room for our kitchen table with the leaf in, which means there will be plenty of room for two more chairs at the table.  It doesn't even feel squished!

To the left of the table up there is a door that leads to the back porch.  

The back porch also extends to the other opposite side of the house and has a little outdoor kitchen (that I doubt we'll ever even use!)

Going back inside the house, this is the view if you are sitting on the couch in the living room and looking towards the front door.  I don't know how I am going to clean that ledge.  It bugs the heck out of me every time I walk down the stairs since it's still filthy from the previous owners.  

This is the view sitting on the couch and looking upstairs.  You can also see the doorway that leads to the back hallway: a closet under the stairs, the laundry room/garage entrance and a powder bath are to the left and the master bedroom is to the right.

This is the master bedroom.  It is the least done of all the rooms downstairs.  It is painted the weirdest color.  It's a very light yellow/green and I HATE it.  They also painted the ceiling of the inset part the same tan as the rest of the house which is so strange.  It is on my list to be the next room painted so I haven't done much with it.  We're also having a rug made out of the leftover carpet from the upstairs to put in here so hopefully that will warm it up.  It's a really big room and the bathroom is off to the left when you walk in the room.  (Sorry, more laundry.  There's a lot of it around here.)

Now heading upstairs, this will be our girls' room someday.  It's almost directly ahead of you once you reach the top of the stairs.  Just a little off to the right.  Right now it's storing all my craft stuff that I can't bear to get rid of but haven't touched in probably 4 years.  (Hey, that's the same amount of time we've been homeschooling.  Coincidence?  I don't think so.)  It will be painted someday since it doesn't look very girly right now.  My cute little Sawyer followed me around while I was doing the upstairs photos.  :) 

Here's another view of this room from inside looking out the door.  The other door you can see is the door to the media room.

If you turn directly to the right at the top of the stairs you see the media room.  This room has gone through the most transformation.  It was a very dark blue, including the ceiling, had risers and several thousand holes in the walls from the previous owners removing all their media equipment.  They had also painted all the baseboards a dark tan.  We replaced all the carpet upstairs because it was seriously nasty.  We also had this room painted the same light gray as the office and had the ceiling painted white along with the baseboards and doors.  There is a door in this room that leads to the back of the closet in the girls' room.  I guess the previous owners used that closet as storage for their movies and stuff.  My kids think it's some secret passageway and love it.  I think it's just annoying and ugly.  Eventually we'll take the door out.  There are also stairs leading up into the room, which is really weird but Sawyer loves to jump off of them and thinks they are awesome!  The room has a door too which is good and bad.  If the door is closed (which is almost always the case if Sawyer is around) then the kids can't hear anything.  Like me yelling at them from downstairs, for instance.  But I also can't hear them or the TV.  We have no furniture for this room yet except that one chair, hence all the pillows lining the walls.  We have ordered a couch but it was a custom order so it should be here sometime in May.  We really haven't been watching as much TV since moving to this house though, so not having anything to sit on hasn't been too bad.  We decided (much to my dismay) not to get cable here.  We got a Roku box and still have our Netflix so that's pretty much all they can watch besides movies.  They really only watched the Disney channel and PBS before.  Maddie is really missing all her Disney shows but she's been reading a lot more (which is a TON because she read a lot before too!) and discovering a few new movies she has liked from Netflix.  (Yes, more laundry.  It's never ending.)

If you turn to the left at the top of the stairs you see the loft/game room.  I had hoped to make this a game/play area for the kids with all the toys here and a table to play games on.  Josh decided he needed an air hockey table too and brought one home without discussing it with me.  I'll let you use your imagination on how that went over.  I hate it but everyone else loves it so it's staying.  

This is the same room where Josh knocked out a wall to give the upstairs access to a bathroom.  The bathroom was shared between the two bedrooms on either side (the girls' room to the right in the picture and Maddie's room to the left).  Now friends or guests can at least get to a bathroom upstairs without going through someone's bedroom.  The door at the end of that little hallway leads to the bathroom and the doors on either side lead to the sinks that are part of the girls' rooms.  Not an ideal set-up but it'll suffice for now.  It just needs to get painted.  We eventually plan to place tile from the sink areas through the hallway and into the bathroom.  

Here's Maddie's sink area.  My wonderful mom came and painted her room a light blue.  You can see in the picture the crazy pea soup green that it was.  We still have to finish up a little bit of painting in her sink area but her actual room is all painted.  I'm going to paint the trim around her mirror and replace the light fixture as well.  Someday.  She is really loving having her own bathroom!

Here's her room with a cute little cheesy-faced Sawyer.  Sorry, it's a mess.  

In the previous picture of the loft you can see Sawyer standing in the entrance to the hallway.  This little hallway leads to a door to Maddie's room (the doorway I took the above picture from) and also the boys' room.  The boys' room is painted the same light gray from the media room and has it's own full bath.  This is a view of their room from the doorway looking to the right.  We sold the boys' old bunk beds right before we moved and are planning on getting them a triple bunk bed soon.  That's why there's just an air mattress right now.  They are NOT happy about having to sleep in the same bed and it has made bed time a little more crazy but they're getting used to it.  The door seen here is their closet.  This room is the biggest of the three upstairs so that's why all three boys are in it.  

This is a view of their room looking straight ahead from the doorway.  You can see into their bathroom now.  There's a big window to the left that looks out on the front of the house to the sidewalk that leads to the front door.  

And lastly, here is their bathroom.  Nothing fancy. 

I thought that was the last picture but I've got one more.  Here's a view from the boys' doorway looking down the hall towards the stairs.  That black lump is Maddie sitting in the chair in the media room.  

The house is coming along.  The garage is still pretty disorganized and Josh is really missing his shed but we're getting there.  Trying to find the right place for everything is the hard part.  I'm very much an "everything in it's proper place" kind of person and having everything out of it's proper place for the last month has been really hard on me.  Things have been moved around several times already, especially in the kitchen and the office.  The kids are still asking me, "Mom where's ______ now?"  Getting unpacked is one thing and getting settled is a whole different thing.  :)