Skip to main content

Our house, in the middle of our street

Finally, the long-awaited house photos. Having family to visit provided an incentive to get the place both organised and tidy, and therefore in a decent state to have its photo taken.

Yes, we are now a two-car family. Toby and I get around in the tinted-window gangsta-mobile.

Thought we might as well take the opportunity to have a family shot. Toby enjoyed meeting his aunt and uncle very much.

The front door is at right angles to the street.
And we've got a nice L-shaped porch area at the front.
Coming inside, we really liked the open layout with the archway through to the kitchen.
The kitchen-dining area, with the back door just visible on the far left.
Looking back towards the front door, with the study mid-right and the entrance to the corridor on the far right.

Toby and Graham surfing the web. The built-in shelving was another plus point for the house. This room was previously dark green which made it very gloomy, so we made it a painting project pretty quickly.

Our bedroom is off the kitchen, with nice big windows on to the back garden.

Toby shares it at the moment, in a bassinet. That's the door to the bathroom, and beyond that the door to our walk-in closet.
The bathroom, and me taking the photo.
The other bedrooms are reached from the corridor off the living room. This is the guest room.

This will be Toby's room, but got pressed into service as a second guest room, hence the airbed.

The crib was generously donated by a friend of some friends, whom we had never even met.
Our back porch. We moved in just in time to enjoy some al fresco meals while it was neither too hot nor too cold.

The back garden. Being the middle of winter, the grass is not at its greenest. Then again, it's pretty dry in summer too.
The house is about five years old, in a modern housing estate (or subdivision as they call them out here). A little more suburban than I pictured myself, and we feel very American now with our walk-in closets and automatic garage door. Still, it's a lovely house, and a nice quiet area for a certain little boy to play in, so we're happy here for a few years.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Mr White Watson of Bakewell

Once upon a time, back in 1795 or so, lived a man who was always asking questions.  The kind of questions like, "Why is glass transparent?" or "Why do fruit trees grow better in that place than in this place?" or "What does the earth look like underneath the surface?"  This last question was one that he was particularly interested in, and he went so far as to work out what the rock layers looked like where he lived, and draw little pictures of them.  Now he was a marble sculptor by trade (as well as fossil hunter, mineral seller, and a few other things) so he thought it would be even better to make his little pictures in stone.  That way he could represent the layers using the actual rocks they were composed of.  Over the course of his lifetime he made almost 100 of these tablets, as he called them. Then he died.  And no one else was quite as interested in all those rocks and minerals as he was.  His collection was sold off, bit by bit, and the table...

Baby Language

For some reason baby equipment is an area in which American English differs markedly from British English. As well as learning how to care for a baby, we had to learn a whole new vocabulary! Fortunately we are now fluently bilingual, and I have compiled a handy US-UK baby dictionary for you. Diaper n. Nappy Mom says if you can read this change my diaper. The first time you change one of these you will be all thumbs and stick the little adhesive tabs to yourself, the baby and probably the changing mat before you get them where they ought to go. A few years later you will be able to lasso a running toddler and change them before they even know what's happened (yes, I have seen it done). You will also get through more diapers than you ever thought possible, creating scary amounts of expense and waste. Hence we are now mostly using: Cloth diaper n. Reusable nappy Cool baby. No longer those terry squares, the main drawback is that there are now so many types it can be qu...

Speedy Steamed Pudding

One of the highlights of being in catered halls for a couple of years at university was the sponge puddings. Great big sheets of chocolate or vanilla sponge, carved into hefty blocks and doused with thick custard. The main courses were edible at best, but those puddings would fill you up for a week. Good solid puddings, whether baked, steamed or boiled, have been a mainstay of English cooking for centuries. Something about the cold, damp, dark winters inspired British cooks to endless variations on suet, jam, currants, custard and other comforting ingredients. Once I left the nurturing environs of my parents' house and university halls, pudding stopped being an everyday affair and became a more haphazard, if-I-feel-like-making-any event. And steamed puddings especially, with their two hours over simmering water, don't really lend themselves to spur of the moment dessert-making. However, technology has moved on since those first days of puddings. I'd been vaguely ...