We are in our new home.
It’s a three bedroom, 2.5 bath town home, plus a loft, double garage, and yard. And it feels quite spacious, if not a little empty. It’s a lot of space for just us. But, in a few months it will feel a bit more crowded with one more to join us. (Interestingly, so much space costs about as much to rent per month as our 1 bedroom plus study apartment in Chicagoland.)
Now it is just a matter of making it home.
Our new home is mostly furnished with the classy furniture chosen for us by the rental studio. They say we can come back and exchange things in a month or so if we decide we don’t like something. But at this point, it’s nice to have a place to sit.
My favorite part of our new home is the front entryway. It has such a lovely, grand staircase. It makes me feel like I’m walking into a mansion!
The downstairs floors are all the most delicious red wood. But I’ve already discovered the downside of having lots of hardwood floors: dust. I can tell I must mop every other day to keep it looking nice. Once baby comes to keep it messy, I’ll be moping all that floor space twice a day. Also, my husband pointed out that it is just too hard to walk around or stand in the kitchen cooking without shoes on. But it sure looks nice.
They sent a console table and an interesting centerpiece. I wasn’t sure what to do with the table, so I put it in the front hallway. What should I hide in that drawer?
The kitchen is very modern and full of quality appliances. My husband likes the five-burner stove. We’re renting dishes and other kitchen stuff until ours arrives in a few weeks.
The orange, reddish, and yellow chairs that go with our dining set are starting to grow on me. The colors all coordinate okay into the red wood floor, so it really doesn’t seem all that strange. I really like the bay window for the dining area.
You can see how much empty space we have between the kitchen/dining area and the couches. Just the right size for a….playpen?
Our living room area looks a bit sparse: there is so much space and two couches just don’t fill it up well. Our piano is coming for the other bay window. We have such a lovely view of the Dandenongs (“mountains”; for those of you in Utah, consider them “big hills”).
We have a backyard! It is quite large. There’s supposedly been a drought (I’ve only seen rain every other day), so the grass is a bit muddied. We’re in charge of maintaining the yard, so it’s time I studied local plants!
Our master bedroom is on the ground floor, just by the front door. Upstairs is a large loft with more hard wood–not sure what we’ll put in that space. One of the bedrooms upstairs is a study with two desks, a small “sweet” one for me (aka, old and lopsided) and a regular office desk for my husband. The other upstairs bedroom will be a nursery! We didn’t get any furniture for that yet. We’ll choose it next month when we go back.
So that’s our house. I like it. I can’t wait until we get our box of stuff so we’ll have our towels and linens and dishes and pictures for the walls. Then it might feel a little more like home.
But so far so good.
