Consider these the "before" pictures

People keep asking me for an update on the house, and so I thought I'd put up a little virtual tour to show you around a little bit. I know I made it sound dumpy in the last post - it's not so bad, really. Actually, despite buying it with plans to fix it up, we really don't HAVE to do much. There are a few things we've known about since the inspection that are must-repairs, and the appliances were all basically shot. We've replaced the washer/dryer and the dishwasher so far, and the fridge and the stove have maybe 2 years left in them, so those are next on the docket (but hopefully can stay in the on-deck circle a little while longer. 3 major appliances in one month were enough, thankyouverymuch.) The major problem with the house is not how much space we have, it's how that space is arranged. So here's what happens when you walk in the front door. what you see right in front of you is the following:

That's the living room. It's fairly good sized, about the size of our old living room. you can see beyond it the entrance to the kitchen. we have a nice fireplace in the center of the room. Right now, our hutch is a bit awkwardly placed besides the couch - it's serving as a bookshelf and keepsake holder at the moment. we'll revisit the dining room issue shortly. Still standing right inside the front door, if you turn to your right, you'll see the space we're currently using as the kids' playroom:

the front of the house is very large picture windows - lovely design element but not terribly energy efficient when it's 20 degrees outside. that explains the large, floor length curtains. So, the playroom space is cute, and I don't mind it. But, the problem is what happens when standing in the doorway you turn to your left:

yeah, I know. Yick. Another large picture window, and this is where we've out of necessity put the desk and an enormous tv, that used to live out of sight in the basement. The problem, of course, is that we don't have a finished basement here, and we don't really have a good spot to put either the computer desk or the TV. the people before us had a plasma TV hung above the fireplace (that's A solution, but a pretty expensive one given the only thing we really use the tv for is kids dvds and for andy to watch sports) and their office area where we have the kids' playroom. they had their dining room table in front of the front picture window. It looked ok when they had it that way, but ours doesn't really fit in. they had a rustic style farm table with long benches....we have a formal mahogany table (matches the hutch) with upholstered seats...it just wouldn't look right right in the front of the house. But, of course, that desk/tv mess doesn't look good either, so it's a work in progress. suggestions welcome. moving on - here's the kitchen.

There are two sections to the kitchen. to take these photos I was standing right in between them. the first photo is of the sink/cabinets (forgive all the dishes, I've been making candy all afternoon). to the right are the stove/fridge. The second photo was taken with me turning 180 degrees. there you can sort of see the original-to-the house glass door built ins and the eat in area. our kitchen table is just a smidge too big for the eat in nook. Enough of a smidge that I think we may need to replace that too, unless we go with one of our plans that involves moving the major appliances to the nook and putting the eat in area at the back of the kitchen. but that's a different post. I didn't really take many pictures of the bedrooms, there are three. I didn't take photos of the master because it's a mess (but I did take a photo of the fireplace in the master, a nice touch) or the kids' room because they're sleeping in it. The guest room is in the back of the house and a total disaster. behold:

Finally, there's the bathroom. the bathroom, I like, actually. everything in the bathroom is fine with me except for the floor.

Yikes. what IS that? who would ever pick that for a floor? It's clearly original to the house. andy and I need to troll home improvement websites and figure out how we can replace that, because once we do I think the bathroom will be nice. I like the fixtures the previous owners chose (they replaced the toilet, sink and retiled the shower, I think) and we found a really nice piece at ikea that fits right in the space behind the door.

and finally, one more view, of Andy watching something on the poorly-sited TV. I'm standing back by the bathroom and the spare bedroom taking the photo.

hmm. that's a lousy photo. oh well. hopefully you get the idea. so, some general thoughts. first of all, the house is very, very white. every single wall is white. I wonder if the previous owners went through and painted it all that way to make it more of a blank slate for sale? In any case, we need color on the walls. I was advised we should paint before we moved in because it was easier that way, but I really didn't want to. We did that at our old house and I felt very rushed into picking out what colors I wanted, and with the exception of the kitchen and the boys' room I quickly regretted every single one, especially the master bedroom and the bathroom. I didn't want to have to commit to colors so quickly again. I'm a girl that needs time to think. I'm also a girl that needs the advice of more aesthetically inclined friends - design and decorations aren't my strong suit. So for now, white it is while we figure things out. Second of all, the layout is admittedly not ideal. The good thing about that is that there is a full, unfinished second floor (not pictured). So, if we get motivated, we could go ahead and finish it, putting a couple (or even three) bedrooms and a bathroom up there, and change around the layout of the first floor since we'd no longer need three bedrooms downstairs. We've had three or four contractors come through and give us as many different ideas on how to do that, so we need way more time to think about that, too. Ok, I have to finish my candy plate for the kids' school and my coworkers. more on the house later.

Update to Add....

The dishwasher does not work. I would like a rebate on the home inspection now.

Moving Right Along

So we moved into our new house, and although this new house has approximately 1 closet, 3 (total) electrical outlets and is crawling with mice, I couldn't be happier that we are no longer living in Copake. I will say that as moves go, this was a pretty brutal one, and it's not like we don't have practice. I realized this weekend that Andy and I have moved together 7 times since we've been together, and that's a heck of a lot of moving. In case your doubt my math: we moved in together to 2205 West Grace. Then we moved to 2 Avalon Drive in Marlborough. From there to 160 Stanton Ave in Newton, then a brief stint at 24 Lyons Court, then to 55 Cerdan Ave, then to 1501 County Rt 7A, and now, here, to Lakeville. And I'm not even counting the fact that just after we met I moved to a new apartment, and between us meeting and us moving in together, Andy moved from his apartment in Lincoln Park to a friend's condo downtown. However, as little fun as all those moves were (especially the one when I was 8 months pregnant) this one was probably the worst - both for me, because I had the one of the worst bouts of stomach flu I've ever experienced (the remnants of which are still plaguing me 3 days later) and for the people that actually did the moving and the watching of the children (if it were not for my tireless brother in law and our amazing friends Sharon and Erik, our heels would still cooling in Copake). The timing of the move was bad to start with - Thanksgiving the previous week so we were travelling, I just started a new job working a normal days schedule and have no ability to take time off for 6 months, and Andy was really busy at work the week before - and then when Elias got sent home from school on Thursday vomiting with scarcely a box packed (foreshadowing! foreshadowing!) we knew things had the potential to go off the rails. Which, of course, they did. Most of my perspective of the move is comes from with my cheek pressed to the floor of the bathroom tile, but I'll tell you that from there it didn't look like much fun. We were much less packed than we should have been, the truck wasn't big enough to get it all in one go (or even two), the kids were cranky and still had a touch of sick themselves, and so overall you can probably imagine, it was a bit of a situation. On the bright side, however, we're now settling into our new house in Lakeville, which despite being old, mousy and a bit hard to live in (storage and furniture placement are a bit of an issue at the moment) is very close to everywhere we need to go so the 50 minute commute I've been slogging through each way is now toast. We're now 2 miles from Andy's work and about 8 miles from mine, and the boys' school is 1.5 miles down the road. And, when Owen goes to pre-k next year, the town elementary and middle school is right across the street! Since we now live in a place where schools serve a VERY large geographic area, and you could be putting your kid on a bus for an hour to the "local" elementary school, I'm very happy about that. Also, we knew the house was a bit of a fixer-upper when we looked at it, and we think that it can be fixed-up (in a little while, not right away) in such a way so that it will be much more liveable (and hopefully much less mousy and with a few more electrical outlets) without too much disruption and money. I think those are probably on the list of "famous last words" but we're in the bright side paragraph right now, so I'm going to let it slide. We seem to be in a really great little neighborhood, and the house next door to us just got sold to a family with to babysitting age daughters which is another plus. I haven't taken any pictures of the house yet because it's still in complete disarray - I still feel badly and we had to go back to work on Monday after moving over the weekend, so we've scarcely had time to unpack anything but the most essential boxes. You know, the trucks, the bedtime stories and the fireman hats. The stuff we can't get through the week without. Hopefully next weekend we'll have some free time to put the house to rights and I'll post some photos of the new digs.