A Tour of the new House!

Hello, and welcome to our new house. It is still pretty awful, but I know my folks would like to see our new digs. I do want to tell you that I had all the boxes neatly stacked according to size on the front porch. It was a vision of organization. Then the kids asked their dad if they could play in them and he said Yes! Aack! Now my porch looks like this:

I will admit that my children and half the neighborhood kids have had a marvelous time playing in the boxes, and they have done a fairly decent job of piling them back on the porch each evening.

This is the view from my porch. It almost makes up for the horrid back yard. Now, let's turn around and go inside the house. Just inside is the living room.

Here is the little living room. Yeah, I know. It is a disaster. You are suppose to be impressed with the fact that you can actually walk through it and you can sit on the couch if you want. 2 weeks ago it was nothing but boxes. I choose to focus on the positive!

A slightly better angle. The kids have been messy in there and I have had my focus elsewhere. I think this is going to be the very last room that gets put together! You may notice I got 2 of my batiks from Africa put up, but I have not gotten any other pictures up. I am not sure where I want to put everything yet.

So, if you stand at the front door with the living room on your right, you are looking down the hall. There is a half bathroom on the left. That is Joshua's bedroom door at the very end. On the right, at the end of that hallway are the kitchen and dining room. The stairs right there go up to 2 small bedrooms, a full bathroom, a nice laundry room, and a good sized master bedroom with a bathroom. Let's walk down the hall and turn right at the kitchen...

The kitchen is lovely and clean because my fabulous husband stepped up and did it yesterday. I had reached the too-overwhelmed feeling and had no desire to deal with the clutter all over the kitchen. Dan is my super-hero for doing it! May I point out that it is a one- butt kitchen. There really is only room for one. If you open the pantry, fridge, dishwasher or oven, there is no room for anyone else in there and you cannot walk by. On the plus side, the counter space isn't too bad.

This is me standing in the kitchen, in front of the stove. I LOVE that it has this open window into the dining room. Love it! It makes the kitchen feel a little bit bigger. The kids like the bar area and want to know when we'll get bar stools so they can sit there. No, I am not planning for the electric skillet to stay up there forever. I just have to find a good place to put it first.

This is the dining room, as viewed from the hall entryway. Since it is big enough, this is where the computer goes. The dining room is a great size and it may be my favorite part of the house. I promptly used most of the space for shelves to fit more stuff.

Yep, them's my shelves! I know, they look frightful. I admit, they are one of those things that I plan to get back to and organize so they look nice, but I never quite get around to doing it. I DO mean to get them looking decent though! (Oh, and that's our back door.)

This is my teensy-tiny backyard. I'm standing in the back doorway. We do have the garage, but to me, there's little point to a garage if you have to walk outside in the rain to get into it. It is big enough to store some things and fit a car inside. Right now my elliptical machine is in there alongside Dan's car. We need to get it up to the bedroom, now that I have cleared a space.

And here's what the back porch looks like! It will look better once we deal with the boxes. Give me a month. Really!

So now you have had the grand tour. Don't you feel special?! Now you know why I have no space to put anything. I have no basement! No attic either. Just a basic house. This means it is time to purge. If I don't need it, it needs to go. Wish me luck on that!