The New House: A Walking Tour

So this is our new house: Significantly smaller than the old one, which was a gaudy 4K+ square feet: more than we needed, and ultimately more than we could afford to maintain. This house is only a little more than 2K sq ft, and will be a little cramped, even after we thinned out our belongings, but it's an adorable historical home, exactly where we want to be living.

The new house is in a neighborhood much closer to campus (it takes less time to walk in now than it did to drive in before), and inhabited by scads of other faculty...our new neighbors hosted an end-of-the-year party this weekend, and we were invited, already besting the number of parties we were invited to in the old neighborhood.

So come on in, take a look around:

The front door opens onto a closed porch, with an eating area to the left and a play area to the right (as always, click pics to embiggen):










As you walk through the next door (itself a more modern front storm door: more secure than the original door required to remain intact by the historical society), you'll look to the right and see the room we're calling the library. I'm working in here now at the writing desk and hutch you see dead ahead.
This is my view back toward the front door from the desk:
And back to the front door, to the left, is the family room. as you walk toward the doorway in the back, you'll see the poster with the full text of Hamlet posted just above the stereo. Ann and I have actually consulted that poster more than once since we've had it.

If you turn around from that doorway, and look back toward the front door, this is the view of the family room...For the record, the literary fiction and memoir is alphabetized in here, with poetry, genre fiction, and writing reference back there in the library...


Cut through that door, and you'll see the dining room and kitchen...the dining room is directly behind the family room, and the kitchen is directly behind the library (but not accessible from there).

From the space at the border of these rooms, you can get good looks at both: The dining room, complete with tone-on-tone stripey wall (flat and metallic paints alternating)

And if you turn around, you'll see the kitchen, with terra-cotta colored walls, new countertops and appliances, and our stuff already comfortably ensconced around the premises. Straight ahead, on the counter, you can barely see four canisters, a Mother's Day gift for Ann, labeled (left to right) "Cuckoo for Cocoa," "Just a Spoonful of Sugar," "Flour Power," and "Better Living through Coffee"...The kids helped me come up with those.
Not pictured, because of tight spaces, a mudroom with coat hooks and shoe cubbies leading to the tiny but functional back yard, a 5x9 laundry room, which instead of laundry has Ann's elliptical, a wall-mounted spice rack, and a linen cabinet, and off of that, behind the kitchen, a half-bath.

Let's go upstairs, shall we? You will not see here the kids' bathroom at the top of the stairs, with Sun/Moon/Stars art and shower curtain, and a lovely sky-blue paint job.

To the left, above the library, you will see the master bedroom...cozy! Messy!
And around the corner through the bedroom is the master bath, which is pretty big, but hard to get a good photo of. There's a tiled shower to the right and two sinks, not one, to the left, and the loo is just below the left corner of the picture...in case you wondered...

at the other end of the hall, to the left of the stairs, you will see a decent-sized bedroom, currently, temporarily, housing both kids and Ann's desk.

And a small yellow bedroom, sunny and happy. Mostly full of half-unpacked stuff that will find a home eventually...
These last two rooms will not look like this in a month or so: the green bedroom will be an office and guestroom, and the yellow bedroom will be our nursery for Baby boy (public announcement of name coming soon). The room that will eventually be transformed into the twins' bedrooms, though, currently looks like this:

A lovely, open, unfinished attic.










So, thanks for stopping by...come again sometime!