The Grand Tour

Last Wednesday, I posted a pic of our "new" house from the front. Here is another view of the house. It is absolutely surrounded by trees and the yard is also surrounded by sunflowers. The sunflowers were in full bloom the first time that Molly and I went out to check out the farm a month ago or so.

Below is the 2 car "garage" that we get to use. If you ask me it looks more like a small barn...but we'll call it a garage... if you insist. The great part is, we get to use the "hay loft" for storage, and everyone that know us well, knows we need a lot of room for storage.

Here's a picture of the house from in front of the garage. I'm thinking twice about parking my van in the garage and traipsing through the snow all the way to the house this winter. Hmmm.

Come on inside...I'll put the coffee on...oops... sorry, I haven't moved the coffeemaker yet. Oh well, this is a virtual tour so it was only going to be virtual coffee anyway. Do you take virtual cream or virtual sugar?

If you look to your left, this is what you'll see. If you turn a little more to your left you'll see the next one. (Ignore the date stamp on some of these. The camera battery had died and I didn't take the time to reset the date when I put the batteries back in.)

Are you getting a feel for what it was like to live in the modern farmhouse of 1913 yet? Well, they probably didn't have an electric stove and refrigerator back then, but you catch my drift.

Okay, now just off the kitchen you'll find the newly remodeled bathroom. I'm not sure I would have wanted to see the "before" version of this bath. It's okay now, but just wait until I move my frogs into it. They should liven it up -what with all their hopping about. I also want to get some type of cupboard to use for a linen closet. Then it will be awesome. Well, at least it beats going to the outhouse, which is what I'm sure the original bathroom was for this house.By the way, that door leads to the basement. How convenient! Just think, you're in the bathroom showering, when you hear on your shower radio that a tornado is approaching. What do you do? Why, you just wrap yourself up in a towel and head directly down to the basement. How clever! I never would have thought of that myself in a million years.

Okay, next we'll walk through the kitchen to what is supposed to be a formal dining room, but we're going to use it for a living room. We're such rebels.

The next room you see is what is supposed to be the living room, but we're going to use it for a bedroom, which is why we're using the dining room for a living room. My handy hubby says he can make a temporary wall with a door in it leading into the bedroom. I'm hoping he actually does this before we decide to move somewhere else in a few years. I used to think I was the greatest procrastinator in the whole world. I'm not. My husband is the title holder in that department. Follow me through the "living room" into the "bedroom". Don't you love the wallpaper? Oh well, at least there will be room for our bedroom set in this room...

...unlike the next room, (which is just off of this room), and is supposed to be the main floor bedroom. I'm not even sure if the queen size bed itself would fit in here with room to walk around it. That is why we've decided to use the bedroom for an office, the living room for a bedroom, and the dining room for a living room. After all, we do most of our dining in the living room these days anyway. Anyway, we're using this room for an office. But look, no red wallpaper, or red curtains, or red shag carpet. That will take some getting used to. It has a huge walk in closet too, that goes around the corner under the stairs for even more storage. We like storage.

Okay, now we're going to go upstairs. Don't you just love the alternated green and yellow/brown stair treads? Quaint, don't you think? It looks like the steps end right there, but the stairway actually turns to the left, and there are two or three more steps. Do you understand now, why I don't want to use one of the upstairs bedrooms as a master bedroom? I don't want to have to get that much exercise while I'm making my trip or two to the bathroom in the middle of the night.

Here's a view from the top of the steps. Straight ahead is our 11yo dd Molly's bedroom. And to your right, you'll find this lovely guest room, or as we'll probably call it, "the Blue Room". This will have a double bed in it and perhaps a dresser if it will fit. It's not a huge room, but there is a handy dandy shelf on which to hang your clothing. What more could guests (usually our grown children coming home to visit) need? I'm going to try to find a small carpet remnant to put in here and maybe repaint the walls before we move in just to clean it up a bit.

Next, we'll enter Molly's room. Take a good look. This will likely be the last time you'll actually be able to see the entire floor in this room. Molly likes to create her own "carpet" of sorts with the clothing she tries on and then decides not to wear. So I guess I don't have to worry about finding a rug for her. Right? The lavendar color reminds me very much of the room I shared with my sister Laurie for a while when I was a kid. Laurie would love it, but Molly would like to paint it a lovely shade of hot pink, what do you think?

Finally, the last room upstairs, to the left at the top of the stairs is going to be a family room/TV room/rec room/play room and also an extra guest bedroom (with the double futon in it), for when more than one of our kids and/or their spouses and/or their children come to visit at the same time. I will definitely need to find some kind of rug to put on the floor in here to make it a bit more comfy and cozy. I'm not sure where that door led to before, perhaps there was a balcony of some sort, but it was boarded up when they added on a laundry room below it.

Here is the laundry room. You can see the brick here that used to be the outside wall of the house of course. This is where my treadmill is going to go so I can use it while I wait for the washer to wash a load of clothes. Thirty minutes at a time should work. At least that's my plan.
And look! A window to the living room! I figure if I place my folding table under the window and strategically place the TV in the corner of the LR, I can watch TV without leaving the laundry room while I'm folding or ironing clothes. Of course I may have to use the closed captioning. This concludes the virtual tour of the new Grot family home. Here is one more parting shot. It's the view from our back door. As you can see, the nearest neighbor is probably a mile away from us, so someone has suggested that we host an outdoor karaoke bash next Summer. Sounds like a plan. Thanks for taking my virtual tour today. Y'all come back now, ya hear?