love ... Love ... LOVE the house!

The exuberance of that statement might make more sense with a little history of the week. I loved the house when I bought it, when we got the keys, even when we began moving in (though I hated the moving). But a few days after we moved in, when it had been really cold, and the furnace had been running kind of incessantly, a fear began to settle in that at one point grew to a near paranoia, and it didn't make me 'not' like the place, but it did overshadow my enjoyment of the place.

I began to get really freaked out about the potential costs to heat this place! Nothing else was bothering me ... the house payment's great, I wasn't worried about the other utilities. Just the heat. I began to have visions (escalating, fueled by growing paranoia) of our heating bills sucking out every spare dime I'd managed to save us in the house payment, till we had nothing left. It was ugly. I was waking up in the middle of the night worrying about it. I began to second guess buying a house 'this size', thinking that we should have gotten something smaller.

But I knew - knew - that anything smaller just wouldn't have cut it for us. And to be fair, this house isn't that huge. People that come here say it is, but I think they're comparing it to our former residence. Okay, yeah, the place has square footage. But in point of fact, the only thing that really makes it larger than the norm is the Imaginarium - the upstairs. The first floor is a basic, if spacious, three bedroom home - largish living room, 3 bedrooms - not unusual, a kitchen that's nice but not huge by any stretch of the imagination, and a very small dining room.

Even the basement isn't huge - it's average-ish. We looked at houses with less square footage with larger basements.

It's the finished upstairs that makes it so big. And I swear to God it's a TARDIS, it simply does NOT look that big from outside! It's a story and a half house, and to get the four bedrooms that were absolutely, positively mandatory, we'd have ended up with a two story house anyway. We never once saw a 4-bedroom house that didn't have a second story.

So I'm not saying the place isn't big, but it's not a monstrous mansion. Nevertheless, it's big enough that the heating issue was starting to concern me. I mean, we went from a 800 or 900 square foot house to one over 2000 square feet. Gonna be a heating differential.

So anyway, moving on ... I did some more math, did a ton and a half of research on reducing heating costs, it warmed up enough to keep the furnace from running non-stop, and suddenly I just 'got over' my paranoia. I'm not worried about it anymore - for a bunch of reasons that will become their own separate later blog post.

But the point is, once that happened, once the worry about the heating bill was gone, all of a sudden there was nothing at all not to totally love about this house. I'm completely enthralled with it! And for that, I decided to give an updated photo tour. :o)

I mean, what's not to love about this ...

This is my view when sitting in the 'lounge' at night watching TV.


I didn't care for the kitchen for a long time, from the first time we saw the place to even after we bought it. We even discussed some major remodeling of it. Some people told me, however, that once I got into it, cooking and working in there, I'd see that in fact it was actually very well designed, for someone who actually cooked, not just puttered.

I've discovered since moving in that they were absolutely right. That island is freaking handy. I initially thought it was too close to the cabinets on either side, and if I were designing this kitchen over, I would prefer an extra foot of space on each side. But quite frankly, it's really very workable just as it is. I like it more and more every time I make a meal in it.

And those cabinets are to die for ... I have almost all my kitchen stuff from the old house in here already, and still have several entirely empty cabinets (including an entire lazy suzan in the corner of the bottom cabinets)! I'll never run out of space in here. This is the infamous Wall O' Pantry. And yeah - it's huge storage, no two ways about it! (It's also still half empty!).

I even love the hallway! I never had a hallway at the old house, and I'm surprised at how big a deal it is to me. It's like, instead of feeling like your entire house is all just hooked together in the middle, when you have a hallway like this, you feel like you're actually going somewhere when you go from one area of the house to the other.


The linen closet in the hallway ... I found some awesome baskets to use for some stuff, on clearance sale at K-Mart. I still need a few more.


The bedroom seems huge to me! Of course, our bedroom was one of the banes of my existence. We only had a bed, a dresser, and a chest of drawers, and two bedside tables ... which, except for the bedside, tables, is all that's in this room, now. Yet to get anywhere in the old bedroom, I was constantly tripping over something. It drove me nuts! Won't be happening in here! And we measured, and this bedroom is actually only a few feet bigger - it's just a very important, well positioned few feet. That's all we needed!


Of course there's still a lot to be done in here. The real bed frame I have (but wasn't using in the old house) isn't moved yet, so the bed is still sitting directly on the floor. And that headboard doesn't go in this room - it's the headboard for the spare room furniture, it's just sitting there, not attached to the bed. And we need bedside tables, and I want to get a nice rug for the area at the foot of the bed.

Oh, the stairs are Tyler's. Since moving in here, his eyesight, hearing, and jumping ability have all seemed to have gotten worse. I don't think he actually got worse so suddenly - I think it was all the traumatic change making him less sure of his surroundings. I feel bad for him for that, but on the flip side it's got to be better for him to have so much room to run around. Oddly enough, this dog hates clutter ... I could tell because whenever the living room got junked up at the old house, he'd start acting all freaky and depressed. When we had it stacked with boxes he was being especially squirrelly. And he seems to love it here, loves just running back and forth through the lounge and the pub playing fetch, or running through the (still empty) living room. But we're planning to put the bed up on a real bed frame once it gets moved, and I know he won't be able to get on and off it ... so we're starting now to train him to use the stairs which Greg got him for Christmas.

Now here's a sweet thing. We have this wall o' closets in the bedroom ...

And this enabled me to have something I thought I'd never have without buying a large, expensive piece of furniture ...


... a TV cabinet that I can close the doors on when not in use! (Thanks for the TV, Paddy!) We have developed a real affinity for falling asleep with the TV on (setting the sleep timer, of course). At the old house, it spawned the crazy habit of sleeping in the living room, initially on an inflatable air bed, and later when that sprung a leak, just on blankets on the floor. Now, we have the TV in the bedroom, in it's own built-in cabinet! So we can cozy up in the real bed for our night-time TV fix. (Of course the inside of that thing needs painted, but that's no biggie).

Now, in this picture - the door on the right is the front door, but you see that door on the left?


You know what that is? It's one of these ...


Okay, why am I going ga-ga over a coat closet? You have no idea - we never had a coat closet at the old house (in fact, we had only 2 closets, one in each bedroom - full). When people came over, we just had to pile coats wherever we could find a place. This is such a big deal to me!

So, yeah ... the heating issue is legitimate, but I have great plans for dealing with that. And beyond that, there is not one thing not to love about this place. Totally love it! In fact, when I look around this place, then think about living in the old house, it's like some kind of cruel and unusual punishment. That was an impossible situation. I don't know how I stood it as long as I did. No one should have to live in such a tiny, tiny house. But that, too, is a post for another time.

We've been enjoying the place too! Tara's Fire band practice has been here since we moved in ...


Of course, the Blair Band Project got a little creepy ...


Love the house. It was meant to be ours. Everything about it is perfect for us, our lifestyle, our situation, everything we need. I am ecstatic!