Room by Room pt 3

Continuing our tour through our new house, today we're looking at:

ANOTHER TRIPLE FEATURE -- Upstairs Bathroom / Main Floor Bathroom / Downstairs SpiderRoom Bathroom

Who wants to talk about bathrooms?  If you raised your hand, it might have to ask you to please leave my blog and never return.  They're a necessary part of the house, for sure.  And we spend more time there than we probably realize.  Plus, our house has 4 of them.  Yes, when we get home from a long road trip, we can all run to the bathroom at the same time!  If that's not living it up, I don't know what is.  I've covered the master bath, so today we'll cover the other 3.

The upstairs bathroom is doomed to a life of elastic bands and blonde hair all over the floor.  This bath has the only bathtub in the house, and a fair amount of drawers and storage space.  (Like hot sauce and winter weather, descriptions of the size of storage space has as much to do with what you're used to as it does with what you have.)  There is some potential dead space in the back behind the tub that has been utilized with some glass shelves that go from wall to wall (it's only 2 feet or so) which is a nice use of space.  The mirror is big and nice, and the lights dim, so you can set the right mood for forcing your children to brush their teeth.

One thing that the previous owners apparently didn't believe in is toilet paper roll holders.  Neither this bathroom, nor the one on the main floor had one until this morning.  While willing to leave the TP homeless and left to a nomadic life sitting on the counter (not entirely fair from me here; the previous owners had a free-standing TP holder) the bathroom does have a very important blow dryer holster mounted to the wall.  I'm not sure why suspending the blow dryer 3 inches above the counter is better than setting it down, but surely there must be a reason.  The hook total keeps climbing in this room, with 6 mounted on the back of the door for towels and whatnot. 

The main floor bath is just a little half bath which hides behind a pocket door.  I don't know what, it is about pocket doors, but I've always liked them.  This bathroom has a medicine cabinet as well as a small wall-mounted shelf, which helps make up for the fact that there is no enclosed storage underneath the sink.  Whatever you put down there the whole world has to look at.

I really like the water-pump style faucet.  We need more reading material in there, because I can tell you that the paint job is mediocre.  All the bathrooms in the house are equipped with exhaust fans, but this bathroom has one with an additional built in light!  Oooooh!

In our first trip to the basement on the tour, we'll take a look at the oft-forgotten 4th bathroom. (I imagine this tour being done in the style of "Clue" (the movie) with us all running from room to room in whatever random order I'm choosing for this tour.)  This bathroom has a shower and is fully functional, though clearly not all that nice.  But, it does have a TP holder, and a hook for a towel.

I have yet to use the facilities down here, and in the month we've been in the home we've probably only used it once or twice.  I've found a few spiders down here, which isn't surprising, and doesn't make me want to start making any regular visits.  The purpose of this bathroom is just to save us from an accident when some kid is playing downstairs too long and suddenly realizes that they've got to go RIGHT NOW.  In a few more years, I'm sure there will be some sleepovers down there, and we'll be able to lock the kids down there and hopefully not hear from them all night long.

Best thing: The faucet in the main floor bath just manages to beat out the pocket door.

Worst thing: Spiders!

Room by Room, pt 2

Continuing our tour through our new house, today we're looking at:

 

TRIPLE FEATURE -- Ella's Room / Julia's Room / Green Room !!!!

My attention span is way too short to go through one room at a time.  And besides, bedrooms are kinda boring.  4 walls, a door and a closet.  But, here we go:

The Green Room wasn't just named so because it was our staging room while working on our master bedroom.  It's also really green.  With, of course, the blue, yellow and red stripes down at the bottom.  The room makes me feel like I'm inside a Crayola box.  It's easily the biggest of the other three bedrooms, but has the most glaring downsides, which are the color, the very small closet (only about 4 feet wide), and the world's worst curtains.  Seriously, they're yellow, barely opaque at all, and remind me of making curtains out of a low quality used Jr. Jazz jersey.  But other than that, the room is great!  The room is currently empty, because we really don't need it right now.  Someday we'll either have some guests to make use of it, or perhaps another kid.  We don't have any furniture to go in there, so for now it stays empty.

 

Julia's room is the most boring of the rooms.  White walls, regular closet and non-hideous curtains.  She was very excited about the pink light switch cover, though, which was her main reasoning for picking the room.  With both girls we haven't worried about the quality or color of the paint on the walls because I don't think we'll ever be seeing it much.  Julia has already done a pretty good job of getting her artwork up on the walls.  I'm sure Ella won't be far behind.  As we now have a basement where girls can play and toys can be messy, we're trying to strike a balance between toys and messes in their rooms vs the basement.  Evidently Julia still prefers her room for cutting pieces of paper into confetti.  The girls also got to pick rugs out for their bedrooms.  Julia very specifically wanted something pink and fuzzy.  We went to 5 or 6 stores before finding this one, which didn't quite put her into over-the-top euphoria, but at least made her happy.  (She wanted an oval rug.)

 

Ella's room is very much like Julia's.  It's square, same closet, blue and grey walls (very masculine) and ok-sized, but not huge.  It came with a move-in surprise, however: the hanging chair!  This has been a big hit with both the girls from the very beginning.  We weren't expecting it to come with the house, but it did, and we're ok with that.  I've been very diligent about reminding everyone that it is a chair, not a swing, even to the point of correcting people if they don't call it a chair.  (They're all probably getting tired of that.)  Amazingly, Julia hasn't thrown any fits over the fact that the chair is in Ella's room and not hers.  She hasn't demanded her own chair, either.  All I can think of is that she considers the chair and the pink light switch cover a fair trade.  No complaints from her means no complaints from me.

 

Best thing: The swing chair.

 

Worst thing: The terrible yellow curtains.  But since those are so easily thrown away and replaced, I'll change my vote to the very small closet in the Green Room.  If anyone ever lives in there, they might complain about that, particularly if they're a teen-age girl.

Room by Room

About a month ago, we moved out of our apartment and into a house.  As both of our blogs went almost completely dark.  (Not that my blog isn't prone to doing that from time to time anyway.)  As virtually all readers of my blog live far away from here, and realistically will never come visit, I figured I'd give a tour of our home, one room at a time.  We gave Shannon's parents a skype-tour by carrying the laptop around the house, but you'll have to ask them if it was useful, or just nauseating.

We start the tour with: the Master Bedroom

We're heading straight to my bedroom, because it's already had a partial unveiling on facebook.  This room is the only one that required work before we could move in.  Yes, a purple paint job (with bronze/copper by the windows!) moved the room into the "requires work" category.  I think a picture is in order so you can appreciate what we had to work with:

Because we've got 4 bedrooms, Shannon and lived in the Green Room (pun intended) until the master could be repainted.  Together, Shannon and I had zero prior painting experience.  But, armed with videos from the internet, advice from Home Depot employees and the firm knowledge that it can't get worse than purple, we painted our room gray ("Manhattan Mist") with white trim, to match the already white baseboards.  Before I allow anyone into my bedroom, I think I'll make them sign a waiver to never closely inspect the paint job.  It's not perfect, but so long as I keep the photos sufficiently small on my blog, it looks pretty good.

The room is 12'x15' or so, with the two window bump-outs.  On one side of the room we have a walk-in closet which is probably about 4'x10'.  It's sufficient for our needs, and thankfully not purple.  On the other side of the room is the master bath.  The shower is a bit on the small side, but everything works, and we've got a total of eight electrical outlets.  Let's see . . . curling iron, straightening iron, blow dryer, electric razor, air freshener, electric toothbrush (x2) and . . . I can't even think of an 8th thing to plug in.  Suggestions?  (Christmas present opportunities?)  Not that we even own half the things I listed, or regularly use those that we do have.  For the record, I'm not sure if all 8 are on one circuit.  They're all next to each other, so I assume they are, in which case you may not be able to run all those things at once anyway.  Two recurring things I'll be highlighting on our tour are dimmer switches and hooks.  We have at least 11 dimmer switches, and close to 40 hooks.  (I'm not sure of the number, but we'll all know by the time we're done.)  Our bedroom and bathroom both have dimmer switches.  I guess it's nice to set the amount of light in my bedroom and bathroom at just the levels I want.  The bathroom has 6 hooks for towels and robes and whatnot, and 4 hooks in the closet.  Flooring in all the bedrooms is laminate (looks like wood).

A final note about this tour: I'm putting in lots of pictures, and they'll show the house as it was when I decided to take the pictures.  I'm not cleaning up for you guys!  A lot of the walls are still bare, and things are dirty, and I don't care!

Favorite thing about the room: That it's no longer purple.  Also, the bathroom is plenty big for storing our stuff in the various drawers and cabinets, with room for collecting dirty clothes, too.

Least favorite thing: The small shower.  This could be partially solved by re-working the shower head so it doesn't stick so far out into the shower space.