...details

The new house is on a smaller lot of 6,600 sq ft. Ours is currently 11,900 and is far too large for me to keep up with. I had entertained fantasies of all sorts of landscaping projects but in reality I don't have the time. The new back yard is a perfect size. There are a couple of small trees, but mostly it is sunny and best of all, it is flat so we won't end up with a big bog in the winter and spring like we do now where the yard dips down in back.

There is also a really sweet little shed in back that is drywalled inside and wired. I'm not sure what we'll do with it. It would make a great playhouse for the kids but we might need it for storage since there isn't a garage. There is also an attached space for gardening equipment and another little space against the back of the house that appears to be used for storage. I didn't actually notice it when we were there viewing the property but I saw it in the pictures online.

The inside is 1,400 sq ft. That's a little bit smaller than what we have now which is perfectly fine becaues there's actually a lot of wasted space here. There are four bedrooms and two full bathrooms! Hooray! The master bedroom has its very own private bathroom that's just for Darren and me. Yay! There will be space for Darren's office and each kid will have their own room when they need it. For now Frances is still in with us at night and Jackson doesn't spend much time in his room anyway since we've always had a seperate play room. I'm not sure what we'll do about that in the new house. I might use one bedroom as a playroom but put in a futon sofa or something that would be comfortable for guests so I don't have to take up a whole room as solely a guest room that won't get used very often.

The kitchen is big, with a seperate pantry, and has space for our dining table at the end of it. I prefer that to a separate dining room because we enjoy being all in the same space for cooking and eating. The livingroom is a good size and there's a wood burning fireplace. The floors are fir and are in perfect condition! There's a long hallway that leads to the kid's bathroom and the master bedroom where the laundry closet is (side by side) and a built in bookcase. You can see that in the pictures but whoever took them was a total moron. They took all the interior shots at night with a flash so the rooms look dark and cold. It's really not like that inside at all.

We'll want to change the colours on the walls but that's the only thing we'll want to do right away. Someday we might choose to update the kitchen and bathrooms but they're perfectly fine as they are. I don't love the front door, or the window they installed next to it, the exterior colour scheme is boring and vertical siding is a weird choice, but all of that is changeable.

Another favorite thing, besides no stairs, is the deck right off the kitchen! It just doesn't make sense to have a backyard that you can't access from the kitchen. We hardly ever use our backyard now even though it's so huge because it just doesn't feel part of the house. Being able to BBQ or easily carry food out to eat outside will be such a treat.

Oh, there is actually something else that I'll want to do right away and that's put a fence around the side and close off the backyard from the neighbors and secure it from the street so I can let the kids run around back there.

Hmm, what else is there. Oh, did I mention the closets? There is a walk-in closet in the master bedroom, a large closet in each of the other bedrooms, three large closets in the central hallway and a very large linen closet in the hallway with the laundry area. Plenty of storage inside!

The house was built in 1940, I think, and though it doesn't have a lot of the character details you'd expect to see in a house from that era, like coved ceilings, it does have the fir floors and all original (or perhaps reproduction) cut glass doorknobs on every door. Darren isn't wild about those but I really love them.

I think that about covers it. Remember what those pictures like because when I post new ones in July after we've moved in you won't believe your eyes!