Adventures in Moving in

All our stuff apparently arrived on Wednesday morning at our new house. I can't be for sure, because we haven't unpacked it hardly at all. Boxes of our possessions stand in stacks in our basement room.

This new house is a lot like our old one, only 150% larger. From the front, it looks like a modest rectangular house, gray-blue with red shutters, with a carport on the right side. But it's a basement ranch, meaning that it appears to be one story from the front but two story from the back. We have a living room, a dining room, a kitchen, a coat closet, a linen closet, and three bedrooms and two full baths on the first floor. The bedrooms aren't that big, but they are bigger than the bedrooms in our old house. The dining room is probably about the same size, but the kitchen is smaller and the living room is a lot bigger. Also, the closets in the bedrooms are a lot bigger than the closets in our old house.

You enter the house via the front door and arrive in the living room. It is currently empty, except for a few boxes, because we don't have any living room furniture yet. To your right is the coat closet. There is a large picture window at the front of the room. Doorways lead to the dining room, the kitchen, and the hallway. The dining room is in the left corner, and there's a large sliding glass door at the back of the house that leads to the deck. The deck is big and wraps around the side of the house, but it is currently a bit wobbly and needs to be reinforced. There's a door that's like a giant set of shutters that goes between the dining room and kitchen. I should also mention that the previous owners went for the "faux bistro" look, and painted fake bricks with plaster peeling off them on the walls of the dining room, and occasional exposed bricks in the living room too. We believe that this is hideous and effacing them from the walls may very well be our first project.

In the kitchen, the vinyl floor is brand new. It is also not white, one of our most basic requirements for a kitchen floor. In fact, it is a busy tiled design, of which I approve whole-heartedly, because it will never show dirt. The cabinets are all wood and I would say that they and the countertops are original. The range is electric and kind of bizarre: it's extra wide and in the center of the cooktop there is a griddle. Pancakes, anyone? It also has two ovens: one normal-sized oven, and a small oven on the left side. This is a clever development and even though the appliance seems kind of old, if it works, I think we will keep it. The sink has two bowls, and there's a nice view to the backyard and the deck; the fridge/freezer is a side-by-side model with an ice maker and water dispenser, neither of which are working at the moment. We're going to need to either fix it ourselves or just buy a new unit.

Coming out of the kitchen through the other door that leads to the living room, if we take a left we go down the hallway to the bedrooms. The first opening on the left is the stairs to the basement. There is a half door (open at the top) to those stairs. On the right is the first of three bedrooms. This bedroom has a lot of shelving in it so I think this is where we will put as many books as we can. To the left after the stairs is the bathroom door. This bathroom has a tub with a shower curtain, a toilet, and a sink. The floor is ceramic tile. All the bathrooms have fans in them, too. The next door on the right is the second bedroom, slightly larger than the other one. It has a ceiling fan and it's on the front right corner of the house. Straight ahead at the end of the hallway is a linen closet. The final door on the left is to the master bedroom. It's not any bigger than the other bedroom, but it has a private bathroom attached to it, behind the other bathroom, to the left when you enter the room. This bathroom has a tub with sliding doors, a toilet, and a sink. It is tiled but the floor is vinyl.

Downstairs the basement is completely finished. At the base of the steps to the left are the washer and dryer, shuttered so that you don't have to look at them. To the right is a large room with a door that goes out to the carport. If you enter that room and turn to the right, there's a small, windowless, carpeted room, the purpose of which we have yet to figure out. But there's a door on the other side of that room that goes to the third bathroom, which has a shower but not a tub, but counts as a full bath to me. There's another door that leads out of the bathroom, which puts you into a hallway to the left of the stairs, and right back near the washer and dryer again. You can keep going straight, however, and you get into what is going to be our rec room, painted "bordello red" (in the words of my better half), where we'll have our futon and TV, and our gaming table. We also plan to install a wet bar down there, although that is a project for a later credit card cycle. There's a door that leads out to the back yard under the deck.

In the back yard we have a flat area with grass, and then the yard slopes down. At night, we have a nice view of the city lights from the back. Where the yard begins to slope down it is wooded, and three stately white oaks from the wooded area shade the house at times. Because this is not Illinois, the neighborhood is not built on a grid and the front actually faces to the northeast and the back faces to the southwest.

I think we're going to like this house! I'll try to take some pictures to supplement my exposition.