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

Bonnie Prince Charlie Walk: Lees to Derby

These final two Bonnie Prince Charlie walks were quite a contrast: the first across empty fields and along quiet roads; the second crossing from country into city as I walked into Derby. I started both walks at the Great Northern Greenway car park, just off Station Road in Mickleover. Walk 1 In order to keep walking the Bonnie Prince Charlie way in the right direction, I first found my way back to Lees by an alternative route. The first section, along the cycle path, was well paved. After that it quickly got very muddy. At least it's a popular walk from Mickleover to Radbourne, so it was easy to find the path. St Andrew's, Radbourne, is rather dominated by memorials. It looks as if the preacher would be hemmed in by tombs! I liked this bench outside, with the text, "The thoughtful soul to solitude retires". Writing this, I only just realised it was a quote. Turns out it's from the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam . The rest of the walk certainly provided solitude,

A Place at the Table: Spiritual Formation Book 12

"God has ordained in his great wisdom and goodness that eating, and especially eating in company, should be one of the most profound and pleasurable aspects of being human." Miranda Harris had been intending to write a book for years. She'd got as far as a folder full of notes when she died suddenly in a car accident in 2019. When her daughter, Jo Swinney, found the notes, she decided to bring her mum's dream to fruition. A Place at the Table was the result. I thought this was going to be a nice friendly book about having people over for dinner. In one sense it is, but it's pretty hard-hitting as well. Miranda and her husband Peter co-founded the environmental charity A Rocha, so the book doesn't shy away from considering the environmental aspects of what we eat and how we live. They also travelled widely and encountered hunger at close quarters; the tension between seeing such poverty and believing in a generous God comes out clearly in A Place at the Table.

Flexitarianism

Hey folks! I learnt a new word today! I can now proudly proclaim myself to be a flexitarian . Yes, I wish that meant I'm in training to be a trapeze artist. Or that I'm a leading world expert on the chemical properties of stretchy materials. All it actually means is that I don't eat meat that much. Well, big deal. That lumps me in with a majority of the world's population, many of whom have no choice about the matter. So why the need for a fancy new word? Because, it seems, that we in the prosperous West have come to regard having bacon for breakfast, chicken sandwiches for lunch and a steak for dinner as entirely normal. But also because we in the prosperous West are starting to realise that might not be an entirely good idea. You know about factory farming, of course. The images of chickens crammed into tiny cages and pigs which never see the sunlight, which we push out of our minds when we reach for our plastic-wrapped package of sausages in t

Martha's Marvellous Munchies

Search This Blog