Well, we survived our second move of the year (and hopefully our last move for a good, long while!). And, in all actuality, it really went as smoothly as a move can go, honestly — we had a lot of help on both ends, everything fit into the moving van and other vehicles (unlike last time), and the kids have adjusted much better to sleeping in their new environment than we anticipated.
On the flip side, we are totally living in a construction zone now because we were unable to complete all of the home projects that we’ve started, which has made unpacking and actually getting situated pretty much impossible. Thus far, we have completed almost all of the painting of the main floor except for the second coat in the master bedroom, and we’ve installed most of the new light fixtures except for one we decided to put in after our original plans for lighting had changed around a bit. However, we still have no flooring in our kitchen or in the playroom upstairs, and our kitchen cabinets are still not painted, either. So December should keep us pretty busy!
Speaking of that playroom, it originally was going to be the guest room, then I changed my mind and decided to put the older two kids in there because that means they’ll be closer to a bathroom (since there’s currently no bathroom in the basement). However, halfway through moving all our big furniture in, we discovered that the queen size guest bed box frame cannot make the corner turn into the basement where we’d intended to put it, so now we’ve reconfigured the plan to once again have the guest bedroom in the second bedroom upstairs, except we’re now combining it with the playroom because that makes the most sense with where to put all the kids’ toys.
Anyway, all of that means that we currently can’t unpack the kitchen (because of the lack of flooring and because we’ll be painting the cabinets here soon), we can’t put the guest bed, one of our huge dressers, or any of the kids’ toys in the playroom/guest room because of the floor, and so therefore there is random furniture in weird places (think: pantry staples in our master closet) and I literally spend about ten minutes (or more) looking for every last thing I need.
BUT I’M SO EXCITED ABOUT THIS HOUSE!
There’s so much to love about it, and I am THRILLED with how well my vision for the updates is coming together.
In no particular order, here are some of the things I love the very most about our new place:
- The yard is nearly twice the size of our last one, and there’s already a ton of infrastructure in place for us to start realizing some of our homestead dreams.
- There was already a chicken coop and a huge fenced-in chicken run, so we ended up selling The Chicken Palace (which makes me kind of sad, but it was great to have this past year or so). However, since the coop and run is even bigger than what we had previously, we could definitely get a bigger flock and even try doing chickens for meat down the road.
- There are three decent-size garden beds already built, as well as a fourth bed full of rich compost to spread over everything. Although we plan to build more raised beds, this means that we can get a great head start on our garden plans in the spring!
- In the back corner of the lot, there’s a large shelter with a kind of pasture area that they were using for their miniature Jersey cows, but which will be perfect for whichever animal we decide to get next (Matt wants pigs, I want dwarf goats…we’ll see who wins).
- The whole backyard is fully fenced, which means I can just send the kids out to play without much worry.
- The house has storage for DAYS.
- We’ve never had a master closet before, and the one in this house is insane. Sure, it was built in the 90’s and so therefore looks a little different than what you’re probably envisioning a huge master closet to look like, but still—it’s got a lot of shelves, it’s got a lot of area to hang clothes, and it’s AWESOME.
- The house is around 3,200 square feet, about 800 square feet of which is unfinished basement. In that portion of the basement, the previous owners lined all the walls with floor-to-ceiling shelving, so there’s plenty of space for pretty much everything we could possibly want to store, as well as a large portion that could be used as cold storage for food.
- Although the kitchen definitely is not what sold the house for me, it DOES have a large amount of pantry/cupboard space, which I’m extremely grateful for.
- Outdoors, we have a one-car garage, a workshop area, AND a barn, all of which provide yet more storage.
- This is a fabulous house for entertaining, as it has two HUGE common areas on opposite ends of the main floor AND a large deck in the back.
- Oh, it also came with a hot tub, which I kind of have mixed feelings about (because of my anxiety over the kids trying to get into it—don’t worry, securing it down so they couldn’t access it was one of our top priorities this weekend).
- We have a master bathroom for the first time ever!
- I’m already never wanting to go back 🙂
- The front room has this huge mantel that is just going to be so much fun to decorate.
- Honestly, I was never into decorating much (seasonally or otherwise) before, but this house MAKES me want to decorate. And you’d better believe we’re pretty stoked to have an actual fireplace to hang our stockings up on this year!
I could go on longer with my list, but these are some of the first things that come to mind. All in all, I’m just feeling so incredibly grateful that we finally found a place that we absolutely love after so many months of searching. (I’m also beyond grateful to my mom and stepdad for letting us live there with them for all this time—we definitely made their lives way more chaotic and loud with our family of five taking over their space!)
I can’t wait to share more pictures with you in the future, but for now, you can get more sneak peeks over on my Instagram, so follow me there if you aren’t already so you don’t miss any!
