A New House for a New Year, Happy 2011!

Dining Room Table Set for Christmas Dinner

Happy 2011, today is January 1st and it's been about 2 1/2 months since my last blog update. We moved into the house in mid-October and spent the next month moving boxes around and trying to down-size. Our garage is still pretty chaotic but things are coming  together inside the house. Here are some pictures of what the house is looking like now:

The kids really settled in well in the new house. No one had to switch schools, so that part was made easy for us. Timmy wanted to spend Christmas Day completely in pajamas, so here's our guy living his dream....

We had a garage sale before we left the old house, and another one here in the new house. We sold so much stuff, and we have given away even more stuff. The new house is about 700 square feet smaller than our old house, and it seems that most of that space was in closets! It's good to purge once in a while, and we are really trying to be mindful about what we keep and what we don't need anymore. Of course, Timmy in his PJ's on Christmas, you see all the disarray and stuff around him.... Guess we probably should have thought that through a little more regarding our space problem.....

This is my chandelier from the old house, moved into the new house

Norah with her pool pals (Oatmeal the Snowman, and Peggy the Penguin)
This was taken Christmas Day, I think it was low 70's that day. Tim jumped into the pool
for a "Polar Bear" dip.... and he said it was so cold, the water burned his skin.

View from the kitchen looking into the family room, this is no
magazine shot, this is a working kitchen that gets used several times a day,
so please forgive the mess!

The plantation shutters got installed this week. I am crazy about them.

Our bedroom, no pictures hung yet. The plantation shutters are in there too.

Another view of our bedroom

Master bathroom, my side, Tim has a duplicate of this on his side. The
white door is the "potty closet" and we are having a claw foot tub installed
in front of the window toward the shower area,
pictures coming soon

Another angle of our bedroom from the master bathroom.

This is the formal living room, the first room you come to when you open the front door.
The slider behind the chair leads out to the pool.



This picture taken from the formal living room, looking toward
the dining room.



The dining room, from the formal living room.

The guest bathroom

Looking down the hallway from the guest bedroom toward
the formal living room and dining room. Our bedroom door is
open beyond the formal living room.

The dining room again, with the new shutters.

 So in the upcoming months, our projects are oriented more toward finishing stuff up. We still have a couple holes in the wall where electrical line had to be run, we have to replace a couple exterior doors, and we have to paint the entire exterior of the house. I think this house has the original paint from when the house was first built in 1998.... it's pretty thin and in rough shape.

We need to powerwash the house, caulk the stucco, and paint. I have almost settled on a dark gray color, and new front doors eventually.... maybe painted bright shiny red. The pool deck also needs to be painted, and that'll probably be a charcoal gray to pick up the charcoal/black tiles in the pool.

Lastly, we need to re-sod the entire front yard. These two projects need to wait till probably March however, since we  can't paint unless the weather is in the mid-70's for at least a week. We have a lot of ups and downs temperature-wise here in Central Florida at this time of year... so we'll be more certain in March that the weather will be consistently warm enough for exterior painting and sod. No need to put sod down if there's any risk of frost. So for the meantime, we wait, and we continue to be a little bit of an eyesore to our neighbors. They've been really patient and easy-going though, so no complaints from them for us.

Last picture, many of you know that my mom was born and raised in Germany. Here's a Bavarian custom for New Year's Day. You write the year around the initials C+M+B on the front door,or whatever the main entrance and exit into the house is using chalk. It's a blessing,wish for good fortune, and a good luck for the house and its inhabitants for the New Year, the initials represent the 3 Wise Men (Caspiar, Melchior, and Balthazar). Gotta bless the new house! We had a great 2010, hope you all have an even better 2011!!!!