The New House - Where's Collin Edition

I know you are all dying to see the new place. Or, you don't really care. Whatever.

Either way, Collin went on a little tour of the house with me and decided to "pose" in each shot. I'm not saying he's hidden, but he is being his ridiculous self. It livens up shots of a house, which let's face it, are boring.

This is what we are calling the family room. Why? Because we have never had both a living and family room before, and the two rooms need to be distinguished from one another. Since this is the room the family hangs out in, this is the family room. These are our new "reclining" couches. I was vehemently opposed to such furniture, in the past. Why? Well, because the love seat of this particular collection was only available with a console in the middle that had cup holders. Gross. That's why we bought two couches instead. Anyway, they are the most comfortable pieces of furniture in the world. They probably won't last a lifetime, but they are good family room stuff, especially with a kiddo.

And, we got a new rug. Since the couches recline, a coffee table would be dumb. The room looked empty, so we went rug shopping. Did you know huge rugs are crazy expensive? They are. And, we should've measured. This one is a little small, but it's awesome. And we bought it from a store we went into because we were tired of walking towards Home Goods. See, the Mills Mall here is too big to walk from one end to the other without a five year old having a mental breakdown. Collin wasn't cooperating and we saw a weird looking "World" goods store. Turns out the Persian guy that owns it had rugs. Who'd have thought? No, it isn't a real Persian rug, but it's good enough for us and we love it. Bryon laid on it and rubbed it when we got home. I think he liked it.

Since we now have a kitchen eating area and a dining room, we needed another table too. See the trend of needing more furniture? I found this 50's aluminum table on Craigslist. Original chairs (pro: original chairs, con: chairs creak like you wouldn't believe). It was super cheap and it's really, really cool. It's in really good shape and leaves pull out from underneath to make it larger. I can't believe how lucky we were to grab this one up.

The dining room has a really large, cool window. It also sucks. We had to spend a fortune on draperies for this house because none of the windows had window treatments on them and, as you can see, the windows are large and both let in a bit too much light sometimes (like when you want to be asleep) and let in the peering eyes of the entire street. Anyway, this window, as you can see, is impossible to cover. The homeowners have very lovely large wooden dowels on the window, circa 1982. They are truly stunning. The joys of rental. But, the room is nice and it just fits all of our furniture, including the china cabinet, and the table with the leaf.

Collin insists that both of these pictures are keepers. We eat in here most of the time.

This is the living room. It is also where Collin was just playing with his knight Legos (see the bin in the middle of the floor?). I think movers are always grateful not to have to lug a treadmill that weighs, literally, 1,000 lbs, up or down a flight of stairs. We made the living room the de facto gym. There's a weight stand behind the point of view of the camera, and there's a TV mounted in front of the treadmill. It's kind of ideal. I love it.

This is how you get vertigo. This is the hallway from upstairs. I only wanted to show my Dad the red desk, and the sewing machine. It was too hard to take a picture from below. The house looks like it was in the process of being "fixed" up when the owners got orders (they are Army), so there are nice elements, like that light fixture, and then weird cheese-ball brass fixtures, mixed throughout (or, that awesome 1980's curtain rod in the dining room). To the right of the green picture is our half bath. It's one of the rooms that seems to have been fixed up, but you have to be standing to shut the door. It's an odd little room, but it's fixed up nicely.

Look, Fillmore and the Bird of Paradise made it too! He flew all the way up to the shelf, too! Or, I put him there. Bryon almost killed himself to get that plant up there though. And, he risks his life every few days to water it. It better flower for all that work! Surprisingly, almost all of our plants survived the move.

This is our room. It looks so barren. There's obviously furniture in there, but we don't need every angle, right?

This is the highlight of the master bedroom. It also mocks us by existing at all. This lovely soaking tub is almost useless. This house apparently has a hot water tank roughly the size of a teapot. So, you can fill the tub about two inches at a time. It's quite lovely for soaking your ankles.

This is Collin's room. Ignore that it's sheet day. It's yellow. He finds this distressing. Every few weeks, he goes into a depression about why we need to paint it blue, immediately. We promptly distract him and hope that he forgets this request because we just don't feel like painting. At least it isn't the pink room across the hall. No, I didn't take pictures of the pink room. The pink room is still "disaster" room. When we don't know what to do with something, we throw it in there. We haven't had any guests yet, so there's no reason to do anything with it except shut the door and pretend it isn't there.

He likes his bathroom. Thankfully, we only had to buy a shower curtain in here. Oh, and a toilet seat cover. There was one of those weird cushiony toilet seat covers on this toilet and it was a strange size. I would venture to say that I have a relatively small butt, and it was hurting my butt. A cushioned toilet seat!

This is my office. Yep, that makes four bedrooms. I told Bryon I wanted four bedrooms, because every family with only one child needs four bedrooms, right? I wanted Collin to have a playroom still, and since we can't use the garage anymore, I either wanted a fourth bedroom, or a finished basement. No toys in my living area(s). Bryon convinced me to take the fourth bedroom as a work space and not keep cramming my stuff into the bedroom corner. I'm glad that I agreed. I love having an office.  It's my favorite room of the house. I have my lazy-boy in the corner and my other book shelf in here too. It's like my nerd retreat.

So, where's Collin's play room. It's relegated to the unfinished basement. It doesn't look much different than the garage. He's wishy washy about it. He likes it down there if we are with him. He'll stay down there for hours--much like the garage. But, Eddie has taken to pooping down there (nice) and he rightly says it smells sometimes. So, we just cleaned the carpet. Can you tell?

I would've taken some pictures of the front of the house and the enormous yard, but it was raining. Another day! I also didn't take a picture of the laundry closet  room. While it's awesome to have laundry on the second floor, it would be even more awesome if the quality of washing machine installed didn't make it sound like the second floor was going to become part of the first floor every time we ran a load of wash. It's a little frightening. I did learn that I don't want front loaders, from this experience. They really smell bad! I have been encouraged not to leave laundry sitting around between loads, though!

Overall, this is probably the nicest house we've ever lived in. It's certainly the biggest. It might be hard to tie with the Rosamond house though. I loved that house. This one is coming close, and might be coming out ahead. I love the house...if only it were in California. (Don't worry, I'm getting used to it here)