Living Room

I realized that I never posted these pictures. This is our living room, decorated for Christmas. usually it's emptier--although my bike is in front of the bay window right now (where the Christmas tree is in this set of pictures).

There are still a couple of other rooms I haven't shown you. There's the family room and two more bedrooms. Bathrooms are bathrooms, so I'm not taking pictures of them.

After I've taken pictures of our the rest of the house, I'll try and make a slide show so that you can see it.

The Lab

So, this house was built in 1935. We have lots of windows and the sorts of things that were important in that time, including a canning kitchen. Next year I might even be able to use it for that purpose.

However, it's much more fun to call it what the Wiz has dubbed it: The Lab. He says we'll practice recipes down in it instead of up in the real kitchen. It's a good place for them to make regular cookies, because I can be away from the flour, if anyone in this house ever makes regular cookies again. It's also good for so many other things, too. Like sewing and making things with the boys. It's a pretty open room, made for messes, and clean up is easy since there is a sink in it. However, the lighting stinks. I need to find a way to add more lamps to the track.

That's enough talking. You want to see the pictures, I'm sure!

The Wiz's Room

Yesterday, we cleaned his room. This is as good as it gets, so I'll show it to you now.Wanna see? Of course you do!There are still five rooms left: Game Boy's room, which will never be clean; our bedroom; the living room; the family room; and the lab, aka the canning kitchen. There are also 2 bathrooms and the hall/nexus upstairs, of which I have pictures, but haven't posted.

The Most Important Room

At our house, that's the dining room. We eat dinner there and often do homework there. That is where we talk and play board games. The Wiz loves to eat, so it's one of his favorite rooms. Game Boy is learning to cook this year, so it's one of his important rooms. The walls are painted one of the Collar's favorite colors. I just like the room.

For your viewing pleasure our dining room, complete with color commentary.


There are more pictures, but I can only post 5. Later, when I am done taking pictures of the whole house and labeling them with my sagacious commentary, I'll probably make a whole slide show, for anyone who's bored enough to look at someone else's new house.

Another room

This time it's the guest room.
There are curtains on the windows, the bed is made, and there are even pictures on the wall. (We could use a few more in there--some how we have more wall space here.)
I want to reassure anyone who is worried they'd freeze to death up here in the far north that we do own blankets. (The winter temps here are similar to the ones central Kentucky.)
We also have a sleeper sofa, so there are places for people to sleep.
Note: This time, my office stuff is not in the room. (Well, except for the bio texts and files, which are neatly stacked in the closet in the boxes in which they were moved here.) We do want to find more artwork because the room is dull. The curtains do help, I think.

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Other stuff: School starts tomorrow. Tonight is the Wiz's school bbq/get together, so no brain-shaped meatloaf today. :( We'll have it tomorrow, instead, and I'll report how grossed out Game Boy is again. I met the Wiz's school nurse, and we filled out his medical plan of action. One thing we added is that he's fail-to-thrive (well, he is) and that he will be given high calorie foods in his lunch. (Not that he'll eat them--we put butter on his sandwiches to give them more calories, and he eats the meat or cheese, or he'll skip the sandwich and just eat his fruit and veggies) because the school has a food policy (low-fat, low sugar foods only).

Game Boy now has a lock for his bike (he's going to ride it to school! By himself!) and he's ready to go.

I've made cupcakes for their lunches (I did the math: 1 box cake mix, 1 container of icing makes dessert for just over 2 weeks) for the same as making cookies or buying cereal bars or what have you. They are cooling now.

I've also made buckwheat banana bread for me. I'll let you know how that came out.

Tomorrow's the best day of the year!

Crafty Things

When I'm not trying to figure out where the last few things go or I'm not working on my classes (school starts Monday for me and on Tuesday for the boys), I've been making things.

I made these two dishcloths from leftover yarn from the baby blanket. (By the way, I'm going to knit an ecru border. I think it needs a little subtlety. Ha!!) Dishcloths are nice, because they finish quickly. I knit these on our way to take Game Boy to camp, and on the way home. I especially like the ball band version.I've made a ton of panel curtains for the bedrooms. The Wiz's bedroom and ours have 3 windows each, when before we only had two. Game Boy's room now has 2 windows, and the guest bedroom has 2. Both of these rooms had one window each. They aren't all hung, yet, but maybe this weekend. (Right, because we never have anything to do on the weekends.) This is an example of the curtains I made for the bathroom windows. They are a bit narrow, but the muslin shrunk. Since I wanted to let light into the room, it'll work. Besides, if anyone is looking in our bathroom, they have to be standing in our wickedly thorny rosebushes.I used up more of the yarn from the Wiz's socks I knit him last Christmas. There is still yarn left over. He's not exactly very big, is he?
Finally, I made myself a couple of skirts, using instructions from this book.
Above is a "Breezy Beach Wrap" made from a cotton remnant I found at W*mart. I pretty much completely followed directions on it (no mods). It'll be cute with a little t-shirt.

This one is adapted from "Singing the Blues". First off, I did not add a patch pocket. Then, I didn't use rickrack. (I think that looks silly on adults. If you like, great. It's just not for me.) I also put the drawstring inside rather than on the outside. Last, after I tried on the skirt, I realized the this didn't look right. I added darts to the waistline. Apparently, normal women* don't have a 13" difference between waist and hips. Once I added the darts and re-sewed the waistline, it fit me much better. It's a comfortable skirt and I'll probably wear it pretty often.

What I learned, though, is that I really need to make fitted waist skirts. They are more adaptable, and it's easier to accomodate my curves.

*Actually, this probably explains a lot about why I can't find clothes that fit both my waist and hips.** What is a normal woman, anyway?
**Before you tell me to lose weight/get fit/or whatever, realize that this ratio doesn't change much depending on my size. No matter my size/measurements, nothing really fits me off of the rack.

A Tour of the Kitchen

I've had some requests for pictures of my house. The kitchen is finished, so I'll do that first. As we finish up rooms, I'll add pictures and commentary.My sign is appropriate, yes?My other sign which you can see in the previous picture. I want one that says something about coffee, too.One of the things that amazes me about this kitchen is that there are so many cabinets. I love that. There's one that was for drying food, but I have decided to use it as a pantry. Blogger won't let me post more than five pictures in a single post, so no picture of it.

Now you can all be sure that we aren't starving.

Back Garden

We have no grass, but we have a lot of potential.We have grapes (and an apple tree), chokecherries, and crab apples. The grapes are doing surprisingly well for a neglected vine. There are a few apples on the tree. There are a lot of chokecherries, and we'll have a lot of crab apples for the birds.

There are also roses, lavender, and a really huge butterfly bush.

We will need to seriously prune things, though. We shall see how things look next year.

Too Much?

When your belongings are all stuffed into 3 rooms, it winds up looking something like this:
(Actually, this picture is after we've moved a lot of things to their proper places.
This is supposed to be our bedroom. Ha! We closed last Wednesday, and managed to sleep in our new house Sunday night. We are now only in our house (well, when we are at home).
Our front entrance--it's sort of situated diagonally to the lot. (We found out how much land is worth here--oh, my goodness.) The house is really convenient to everything. The Collar walks to work, we can walk to a grocery store, ride bikes to the others, walk to downtown and the post office--it's really nice to be able to have a lower gas budget because we walk!
I have priorities. These are roses I cut from our rosebushes. Aren't they beautiful? (The vase is a gift from the Collar's sister and her husband. It came from Italy. It needed something special for its inaugural use.)

In between moving into and unpacking our new house, The Collar has had a busy two+ weeks. The first day, he had an interview at the local paper. The second day, he was on tv. All of this was for Bene-fest, a concert to raise money for Habitat for Humanity. We've also been to parks, the farmer's market, the Sweet Onion Festival, and various other places.

We now have DSL at home and our satellite service hooked up. The technicians were great. One was a former Los Angeleno, who found out we came from Kentucky and warned us about winter. Everyone has been really friendly. It doesn't even matter where people are from. I think everyone's self-selected to be here. :)

Home

The window in the entry hall.

We closed today. Hopefully, we'll be living there by the weekend. It will be good to sleep in our OWN beds again. It's been over three weeks now.

The Goal

Things are in happening very fast. Tomorrow, the packers come. The next day they load the truck. The next day, the Collar's dad has surgery.

Eventually, we'll make it here:A view of the dining room and one of the built in cabinet/shelf.An alcove in the hallway.

Catching Up

Here's something that I haven't posted for awhile:We had meatloaf tonight. The boys ate pretty much all of it. (If you can't tell what it is, it's supposed to be a hot air balloon. )

This is a picture from the (hopefully) new house. I fell in love with this kitchen. How cool is that oven? It works, and it's very retro. Actually, it's old. But who cares? It's cool! I love it.I'll post another picture of a different room, later.

Still in WA

I'm still in Washington, doing the house hunting thing. I think we have a house, but you know how these things work! Currently, the inspector is working on his report. I checked on my class, and now I'm blogging for you (me).

It's a cute house. It's bigger than what we currently have, by about 500 square feet. There's less garage, but more storage in the house than our current one. The boys would be able to go by foot power to school, which is good, and The Collar would be able to walk to work. I'd post pictures, but I'd feel like I'm jinxing things.

If we could just have things go smoothly, I'd feel better. It's kind of scary, this part.

Keep your fingers crossed, please! Or pray. Or you could always do both!