Our New House

As mentioned in an earlier post, my family needed to move – I say needed rather than needs because we’re all done – we found a place and moved in this weekend!

It’s a 2-minute (if even that) drive from our old house, a 10-15 minute walk (depending on which route you take), and keeps our kids in the same schools so they didn’t have to leave their friends. They can walk to our old neighborhood to see their friends and they already have school friends that live in our new neighborhood. Our townhouse division is right next to a big park with a few playgrounds, soccer tournaments, a bike & jogging path and a water park that we’ve already learned to enjoy (my favorite feature is the Toilet Bowl of Death). We were very fortunate to find this place – it was the only one that met our 3 important requirements: kids stay in the same schools, we can afford it, it has the same amount of space. In fact, this place has MORE space because now we have a small patio and back yard!

Wanna take a look? I know you do!

A look down one end of our street. We live in a townhouse subdivision that looks a lot like an apartment complex because there are so many cars, the houses are close together, etc – but we live down on the far end of the division, next to a big park, and on a U-shaped street off the main road, so we have much less car & foot traffic. Each townhouse has a 1-car garage so the 2 you see side-by-side belong to the 2 townhouses that are side-by-side.

Our front door, closet, stairs and our 4 year old. The walls throughout most of the house are this gorgeous gray/aqua color, and our black, white and red furnishings go perfectly – it’s like the owner new my most-favorite color combination and painted the place just to suit me. Unreal! (I bet @fertrue, my friend who is helping me brand my Etsy shop, will get a kick out that – and the rest of you, just wait til all my branding stuff is done – you’ll see what I mean).

Downstairs half-bath, in dark green. And just inside the bathroom is a utility closet which contains . . .

Our very own washer and dryer!! Throughout our married life we’ve had just about every type of washing machine situation – we’ve had building machines that took quarters, shared “free” machines with other tenants, we’ve had to use the laundromat – but this is the very first time we’ve had a washer & dryer ALL TO OURSELVES. At the moment, this is my most favorite thing about this place.

Walk past the half-bath into the living room and on the right is our kitchen, painted a sunny yellow. I love that there isn’t a full wall, and love that there isn’t just a chopped-out pass-through window.

Look, a pantry!

Here’s the actual kitchen.

Standing in the living room, kitchen to the right, and look – our patio! WE HAVE A PATIO, Y’ALL!! Oh – one thing I love is that our windows face very private areas so we can leave them uncovered and no one is going to be walking by and looking in. We’ve battled the privacy/sunlight thing for years as we always end up living in places that have windows in areas with lots of foot traffic.

Ok – upstairs landing area. We think a tv w/videogames & DVD player will go against that half-wall – it will be the kids’ area.

Our room (door open on the left), 4 year old going into our daughter’s room (yellow, like the kitchen), upstairs bath on the right, I’m standing in the doorway to the boys’ room. Our room and our daughter’s room look out over the back yard.

Our patio (that’s the neighbor’s patio with the picnic table). Our yard extends to the left behind the building, where there is another wooden fence stretching back to about where that tree is. Right behind the tree, the lawn slopes down to that brushy area, where there is a small creek. On the other side of the creek is a massive field, then a tree break, and on the other side of those trees are single-family homes and the big park/waterpark we like to go to, and the junior high the older kids will go to in the next 2 years. I’m really excited for next spring/summer, to plant some flowers and maybe something edible, for the first time. The patio/backyard/view is my 2nd most favorite thing so far about this new place, even though we’re headed into winter. I can’t wait to explore the creek area with the kids!

Vincent and I have spent the last couple years hanging out on our front porch/lawn, talking about re-doing the tiny garden area with pavers so it could be like a little patio, wishing we had a more private yard. We like to chill outside with a drink or some food, a book, music, friends, family. We like to watch the kids run around and play. Our last place was the first place we had a front yard area (it was our first non-apartment home) and now? Now we have a nice front yard but ZOMG LOOK AT THIS BACK YARD!!! We get our own small patio & yard but we get to look at this beautiful field, and trees. The location of our townhouse in the division is so awesome – 95% of the other townhomes have backyards that face other backyards. Ours is on the edge and next to the park so we really lucked out.

A view of the big field from an upstairs window.

So yeah – we’re very happy with the move. A month ago when we received the notice that we had to move, we never expected to end up in a place this awesome. We are very, very fortunate.