Meet our New House

It finally happened.

I feel like I've probably been going on for years about our off-and-on, more-casual-than-not house search. We've always loved our current location, even if we don't love our current house, so for any house to ever match the convenience and joy of living across the street from the park and a mile from downtown, it would have to be just about perfect. It would have to have some acreage, partly grass and partly wooded. It should have extra space for ranging beyond our property lines. It must have privacy. It would have to have, if not necessarily more square footage, more open areas for living. It should have personality, although hopefully not a wonky and spiteful one.

It would basically have to be the house that we just agreed to buy.

I was too excited, and the kids were too wild, for me to take great pictures of our recent visit to the house that we're buying, but, for what it's worth, here are some of my favorite parts of it:

The property has woods, albeit a sort of brambly, overgrown woods that no one has tromped in for decades:

The kids and I explored some of these woods on one morning of our visit, however, and even picking our way around thorns and through brush, we already found so many treasures--a sinkhole, a creek, a jack in the pulpit, a tree growing out of the bottom of an overturned, rusted-through metal washtub.

I've assigned the kids to trail-blazing after we move in, and they've made their own plans for a secret fort where they can spend the night, and a secondary clubhouse, and also a tree house--basically their own little primeval village.

The property has fields, and a substantial amount of them, enough for a giant garden next year:

The current owner says that this field used to be fenced, and horses and cows lived there, so the ground should be very fertile. My dream for it this summer is to fence in an area for a garden next year, then set the chickens free to roam inside and do all my tilling and fertilizing for me.

The property has several odd little buildings on it, including a garage, an actual smokehouse (perhaps next year's chicken coop?), an actual root cellar--

I have no idea what we'll do with this. Do you?

--and a just-about-to-fall-down 1930s general store:

Yes, I'm serious. If it stays standing this year, we can hopefully budget to get it renovated next year--or at least get the floor stabilized enough to be able to walk inside without probably having the whole building collapse on you.

We have a goodly amount of space between us and our next-door neighbors on one side, but on the other side, we do have a neighbor pretty close:

Yes, I'm serious about this one, too. The current owners of the house had owned this drive-in since 1955. They recently sold it to another family, who plans to open it again this month. Matt and I have taken the kids to this drive-in ever since they were born--when they were babies and toddlers, they'd actually fall asleep on the drive TO the drive-in, and then Matt and I would feel like we were dating all over again, sitting on lawn chairs watching a movie with our kids sound asleep in the car behind us. 

My main goal the second that we've moved in is to somehow convince the owners of the drive-in that it would be an excellent idea to let us drag our lawn chairs over to watch movies for free anytime we want. Doesn't that seem like something that you would want to let us do if you owned a drive-in?

Okay, if you're still lingering, rubbernecking our insanity, then now you get to see the actual house!

This is the foyer: 

It goes across the entire back of the house, both the 1980s addition that doubles the square footage, and the original 1940s portion. It opens up to the main door from the driveway AND the back deck, and has two doors leading from it to other parts of the house. I had been hoping to set up an aerial silks rig for the kids (it's the biggest item on their wish list) across one of those beams, but it turns out they're just decorative. Maybe that beam up top will bear weight, or maybe we're just destined to have an aerial silks rig in the living room. The washer and dryer are on the main level in this house--yay!--so the kids can start doing their own laundry, ideally. We also have room for a bench by the front door, and the plan is to set up a system to neatly store shoes and other outerwear here.

From this foyer, there are honest-to-gawd windows that look into the 1940s part of the house:

I guarantee that my kids will never use a door to get from one room to the other.

The kitchen has its own table!

Think of it--a table, just for eating, right in the kitchen! AND there's room for another table in the living room:

The video game stuff that Matt and the kids like could go in here, and I don't know what else. It would be nice to have a place to watch family movies, and certainly some of the children's toys will need to be stored in here. I'm not in love with the carpet, so perhaps this is the place to put the table for messy art activities, with a cheap rug underneath. This is also likely where we'll install the aerial silks rig, if it doesn't work in the foyer. When the girls are older, though, we might give this room more over just to them, so they can have a more private place to socialize with their friends.

The kids' new bedroom is a little smaller than their current one, but it has a big closet, and won't need so many shelves as they have now, because our dream is to shelve the entire family's books together in the big family room. It does have sunny windows--

--one of which leads to a concrete patio where they can play and we can have a container garden.

The kids will also have their own bathroom, thank goodness:

On the other side of the bathroom is another room just that size that I would like to use as my study/studio space. See the skylight?

I'll also need to upgrade that lighting fixture at some point, because that other window looks out onto the foyer, not the outside. I'd love to not store our homeschooling materials in this room, because that's what takes up the majority of my current study/studio, but I'm not sure where else they'd go. This house does have two humongous walk-in closets, so perhaps one closet *could* be dedicated to homeschool materials, with materials currently in use stored elsewhere?

Perhaps here, in the big family room?

We'd like to put a permanent space for the children's computer and our printer here, perhaps underneath a loft bed that we already own, with a reading space on top and large bookshelves on each side. My dream is to shelve the entire family's books together, organized and alphabetized like a library. The space is also big enough that I'd like to score a huge conference table from our university's surplus equipment store, large enough that we could have a couple of projects going at once AND have space for schoolwork. Our big dorm couch can go here, and our record cabinet. I'd also like to attractively store our large collection of games and puzzles here , and the children's creative, large-format toys that love to have space and that the adults love to jump in and play with, too--building blocks, racecar tracks, etc. The room also looks out onto a large back deck:

It will be a friendly space to live our days on in nice weather.

Matt and I plan to upgrade to a king-sized bed in our humongous master bedroom:

We'll actually have room for nightstands to hold our books, and my treadmill could go here and not be squashed for space.

This room has its own big bathroom, with a giant walk-in handicapped shower (that wants to be renovated into a large jetted tub, perhaps?) and TWO giant, walk-in closets.

So that's our house! Our hope is to be settled in by the end of May, so we can start stressing about who on earth will want to buy our current house.

Ideally, someone who really wants a hallway with handmade comic book wallpaper, and a basement that has a giant timeline on it, and kid-painted rainbows on many surfaces...

The Great Room Switch: Painting the Study

When Will was a toddler and we first bought this house, we moved all her toys into the second of the house's three bedrooms, really just an enlarged pass-through from the hallway into our own bedroom. It's big enough for a full-sized bed if you keep it low so that it doesn't block the window (although having that window sill above the bed has been the reason for one child's visit to the emergency room so far), has a couple of good walls to build shelves on to hold the girls' ridiculous amount of toys, and it's just a doorway away from our bedroom, so that when little girls make a peep, the Momma and the Dadda are just a doorway away.

Just a doorway. No door. Ahem.

Add to THAT the issue that the girls are early birds and turn on the lights in their room before the sun comes up, AND that they don't want to share a bed anymore, and you have the storm that caused me to hatch the plan that I sometimes see as brilliant and sometimes see as hare-brained:

We're switching the girls' bedroom with the third small bedroom that lives in the front of the house, a room otherwise know as our Study/Studio.

Can you think of two rooms that are MORE full of a truckload of crap to have to exchange? Nope, you can't.

Friends, this move has been ridiculous. Absurd. Worthy of a nervous breakdown. First, we moved all the girls' stuff down to the playroom, where you can no longer even walk due to the accumulation of that on top of the playroom nonsense. I went through a bunch of our stuff. We had a garage sale. I went through a bunch more of our stuff. We took a load to Goodwill. I went through a bunch MORE of our stuff, and we put some stuff out by the side of the road with a sign that read "FREE."

We still have a bunch of stuff.

When we first moved into this house, we were in a big hurry, and so we didn't change anything or make anything look nice. We also had this toddler, so there wasn't really much time to do a good job on whatever we did try to do, like painting or gardening. And then we had another kid just a few months later--you should have seen the lousy paint job that I slopped on their bedroom walls, with them rolling around my feet making messes and getting into trouble.

This time around, one of the things that I'm most looking forward to is the chance to make each room look...nice. Do a little planning. Use a little forethought.

And then I went ahead and painted our new study silver anyway:

And I let the girls help:

No, it's not turquoise like the studios of all the famous crafty ladies, and it doesn't make the room in this already very dark-ish house any brighter, but that's what track lighting is for, and I love how the walls are shiny--it's like living in a treasure chest, or a magpie's brain.

The former gigantic toy shelves are getting all set up with homeschool supplies, and I wrenched my back moving our brand-new IKEA table, and the fabric looks all neat and tidy so far, and you would not BELIEVE the number of fights that Matt and I have had so far about super-important details, like the locations of power strips...

This study is going to be so excellent.

Her Bi-Weekly Book Collection

We go to the public library usually twice a week. Before we leave, I ask Willow to sort through her chapter books and stack the ones that she's read by the door. Here's her stack for today, about the same size as usual:

Will does read many books cover to cover in one sitting, but she also has an assortment of half-read books all over the house, picked up and reshelved by any passing parent, and she doesn't seem to mind losing track of and then re-finding and re-finding her place in books, either, so any particular book in the stack may have been read in hours or weeks.

Returning books to the library is generally one of Matt's homeschool chores, as is picking up held items from the library's drive-up window. You can go online and request that any library item be held for you to pick up at the library drive-up, so this is generally how I choose all of our non-fiction and homeschool books, from dinosaurs to Pompeii to how peanut butter is made, as well as related software programs and audiobooks and music CDs and DVDS, as well as my own novels and cookbooks and craft books and parenting books and homeschooling idea books, as well as all of Matt's stuff. Just this morning I taught Willow how to use the online catalogue, too, sooooo.... Yeah, it's Matt's chore.

At the library, Syd picks her own picture books, and she's permitted to choose one DVD, too, and I might check out some of the magazines that I've grabbed to read while the girls play, and Will and I both work to choose her next huge stack of books. She looks through the shelves of first chapter books while I look in the regular juvenile fiction section for longer books. It's a challenge, often, to find regular juvenile fiction that's appropriate for a six-year-old--just because she can read a more sophisticated book doesn't mean that she's interested in (or ready for!) more sophisticated themes. We've had good luck with Nancy Drew so far, and the Black Stallion series, and the Misty of Chincoteague series, and the Little House series, and the Moffetts series, and sometimes the Boxcar Children books, although those get a bit repetitive (the number of times that the children speak the word "boxcar" really gets on my nerves). So far Roald Dahl, Beverly Cleary, and E.B. White are no-gos. Someday soon, we'll all have the pleasure of their company, I hope.



Right this second, Sydney is already in bed, listening to a Magic Tree House audiobook. It's later than usual, so it sounds like Matt skipped the night-night books and poetry in favor of just getting the kids in bed with their eyes closed, but she and I had an extra-long time this morning with Magic School Bus and That's Good! That's Bad! and Robert Frost and Eyewitness Skeleton, not to mention the Readable Feasts program at the library this evening in which Ms. Janet read books about Alaska to the children and then they all made baked Alaska together, so Syd's happy to simply lie down for a change. As I write this, Matt's telling Willow, for the fifth time, to put down her book and get into bed, and his voice just got lower, which means that firm speaking is afoot.

After the girls are in bed I'll sew for a while (I'd like to get Will's pants patched with their heart appliques tonight, because I know she'd like to wear them to our tour of the fire station tomorrow morning), and then I'll close up shop, turn out the lights in the study, hop into bed, and read for a while.

Runs in the family, this book thing.

I Lost the Babies, But in Other Ways I Am Organized

Willow and Sydney had a playdate this morning because I wanted to get some work done. Specifically, I wanted to grade papers all morning, not read books and play board games about dinosaurs and see if the laminator will laminate leaves and playfight with sticks in the front yard and maybe watch a segment of Mythbusters--these are my favorite things to do of a morning, true, but grading papers? Must be done.

So we invited an adorable little schoolmate over to play with the girls, and there was much running up and down stairs and in and out of the house, etc.--your typical playdate. At one point in the morning, however, Sydney came in and asked for a snack, and so I thought I'd find Willow and the little friend and see if they wanted a toasted cheese quesadilla, too (the little friend claimed, however, that she isn't allowed to eat snacks at other people's houses, but that's a later story). I didn't see the girls upstairs, so I ran down to the basement playroom. No girls. I figured I must have missed them somewhere upstairs, so I ran back up and looked in all the rooms, calling their names. No girls. Now I figured I must have missed them downstairs after all, so I ran back downstairs, and looked in the bathroom off of the playroom and the closet under the stairs, calling their names.

No girls.

So now I think that they must be hiding, so I run back upstairs and look really well in all the nooks and crannies in all the rooms, calling their names sternly and announcing trouble to come if hiding places are not revealed.

No girls.

And now I start to panic. I think of all the places in which a mischievous hiding little girl or two could come to grief--did one girl lock another in a Rubbermaid bin made empty due to our recent organization, and then panic, herself, and hide? Could they have climbed into the broken dryer and then passed out? Emptied the chest freezer of food, hidden that food, climbed inside the freezer, and shut the door on themselves? Drunk a full bottle of hydrogen peroxide and crawled underneath the kitchen sink to die? I run back downstairs, like an IDIOT, and check the dryer, and the freezer, and the nook where the furnace lives, and the space around the chimney.

NO GIRLS.

And now I think, I HAVE WASTED TOO MUCH TIME. Whatever has happened, I have wasted lots of precious minutes running back and forth, while these children are in danger or dead. So I run back upstairs, heading straight to the cell phone so that I can call 1) 911 2) Matt 3) the little schoolmate's mother.

And as I pass the hall closet, which I have looked in at least four times in the past few minutes, I hear "gigglegigglegiggle." And from beneath the winter coats and behind the stroller and sturdy boots crawl Willow and her little friend, just giggling as hard as they can giggle.

And that's how I had my first heart attack.

In other news, the expansive organizational project of the girls' bedroom and our study/studio, the two messiest rooms in the house on account of they are constantly inhabited by three of the four messiest people in our family, is finished. I didn't finish grading papers this weekend, but I did finish putting all my favorite things, and all of the girls' favorite things, into clear plastic bins with sturdy lids. And then I labeled those bins. And, um, color-coded them. Because if you're going to do something, you might as well overdo it.

Here's part of the closet in the study:
You can see the bag in which I keep my teaching materials for my cloth diapering classes; the bin containing acrylic, oil, and tempera paints; the bin containing bulk colored pencils, the big jug of Mod Podge; the smaller box of plaster of Paris; four rolls of contact paper; the bin containing the one-inch pinback button machine and all its parts; the bin with all our hole punches; and the edges of small bins that contain seashells and artist trading cards. Oh, and at the very top, my brand-new and best-beloved Cricut, which I'll rhapsodize about some other time soon.

Here's another view of that same closet, if you can believe it:

You can see the big bin of bulk crayons, with our various pads of artist's papers stacked on top of it; bins of popsicle sticks, wooden cut-outs, and river rocks; the box of activated charcoal that, combined with the river rocks, goes into our terrariums; a bigger bin with all our paintbrushes; a small bin of pom-poms (and perhaps googly eyes); and bins of scrapbook embellishments and blank puzzles.

You probably can't see the labels on these bins, but every bin is labelled. And every bin has, below the label, one of three things on it--YES, NO, or WITH PERMISSION, and is underlined with either a green, red, or yellow marker. One of the main things I wanted to accomplish, as well as actually having a place to put all my crap, is to help the girls understand what materials they have access to. I take their roles as collaborators in our shared art and as artists in their own right very seriously, and I wanted to reassure them of what supplies they're permitted to use unsupervised, what they must be supervised to use, and what is off-limits. Basically, only the vintage beads, the jewelry findings, the soldering supplies, and the scrapbook embellishments are forbidden. The most important distinction in my mind is the WITH PERMISSION from the YES, or, for Sydney, the yellow underline from the green underline.

Bigger shelves elsewhere in the study hold bigger stuff:

Here are bins of blank papers, vintage papers, purchased scrapbook papers, scratched/warped vinyl record albums for crafting, and bulk markers. On top of one of the bins is a huge book of wallpaper samples--this is lots of fun for flipping through.

Even my desk received its fair share of attention, desperately needed, with a couple of nice, big paper bins labelled--

Although I'm not sure why I marked them NO--you'd think I'd welcome the help of anyone who wanted to do my paperwork drudgery for me...

Door Shelves! From Doors! Now They're Shelves!

At the Habitat for Humanity's Restore a miraculous discovery was made--old closet doors, $5 a pop, were exactly the perfect size to fit into the playroom nook in which we'd wanted a bank of sturdy shelves. So, down came the rickety plywood shelves that Matt slaved over making and that I constantly griped about hating (on account of they sucked!), and after an entire afternoon of this--

--we now have, awesomely, this: Finally, space for beads (Perler beads for mosaics and regular ones for stringing and collaging and decorating and embellishing...)Finally, space for toys you need space to spread out with, board games and floor puzzles and Legos and blocks:
Finally, space for the art supplies that I insist on buying in bulk, because frankly, I'd rather run out of food than art supplies:Finally, space for the kind of good non-fiction books that you really need to lie down on your belly on the floor, maybe with a big pillow or two, to explore:Finally, space!!!!
What with life, natural disasters, and everything, I haven't had too much time to throw all the stuff on them that I want to, and I won't be doing it tonight, either. On Tuesday nights, I feed the girls an early dinner before my office hours and their dance class, and after office hours I put them to bed while Matt goes to get grown-up take-out from a real restaurant, and then we sit down, at a table, just the two of us, and eat and talk like adults. What do we talk about?

The kids. Duh.

Back on the Grid, Free Stuff Included

We're just now recovering from our 23-hour power outage here (I want to be one of those mothers who looks at a power outage as a chance to reconnect with her family without the intrusions of technology, but I am most definitively not one of them), which blew all our big Sunday plans--Matt was going to do all the household laundry, and fold it AND put it away, which is a BIG DEAL, while watching football, and the rest of us were basically just going to craft and play and stuff, but with, you know, a light to pee by--and so instead of the photos of the brand-new awesome door shelves in the playroom, which I didn't get to take, or the photos of all the awesome craft fair stuff I made, which I didn't get to make, I'll show you what we got today from the public library's book sale FREE DAY!!!!!

Wait, that's the cat. MOVE!!!Ah, here we go! The girls' shopping cart (which they took into the sale because they are just that awesome) and the stack next to it are all romance novels for my students--I'll make them take one and read it and write a paper analyzing it when we study the romance genre later this semester (right now we're on Star Wars--I just tonight had to break it to them that Luke Skywalker was a member of a terrorist organization attempting to overthrow a ruling government. Yes, friends, blowing up the Death Star was an act of terrorism). The romance novels range from the 1940s old-school Harlequins with the duchess who falls in love with the brutal yet passionate czar to the contemporary ones that all seem to revolve around a single woman looking for a father figure for her adorable yet troubled child. Weird.

The girls picked clean the children's area (they got all the awesome geography picture books that nobody wanted to pay for--Tasmania, and Eastern Bloc, and My Mommy was Born in Germany) and then ransacked the young adult shelves for all kinds of inappropriate titles, but I bribed them into letting me sort through their collection and take out the teen heartbreakers by offering them a set of animal encyclopedias, so now we're flush on good animal pictures to cut out and do stuff with.

I got a couple of books to read for real, but mediating my kiddos requires so much energy that I really didn't have time to give the sale a good go-through just for me, so mostly I just grabbed all the halfway-decent crafting books that I saw. I got Needlepoint: The Art of Canvas Embroidery, which I'm not that excited about except that it does have some construction patterns for canvas containers; Better Homes and Gardens Gifts to Make Yourself, which has instructions for making those big cardboard puzzles that little kids like; Sewing The New Classics: Clothes With Easy Style, whose clothes are mostly baggy and ugly but from which I think I can figure out how to make jammy pants; Have a Natural Christmas 1980, from which I am totally going to make some pomanders; and , which has a pattern for bell bottoms(!).

Yep, it took me three trips to the car to drop all this stuff off, while the girls sat on a bench on the sidewalk and spilled chocolate soymilk on themselves (from Bloomington Bagels--don't get me started on how much I hate taking my kids to a restaurant by ourselves, but we were off the grid, and we had to eat!), and then I got yelled at by some guy who'd apparently been waiting on me to leave in my car so he could take my space, but I'm sorry, it's not my job to watch my kids and where I'm going and figure out what the people in other cars are doing, too, and then we went back into the playroom and the girls played while I utilized the library's electricity and wi-fi to write my lesson plans and grade my online homework submissions, and then we left the library, and I was yelled at AGAIN by some woman who got out of her car to come over and ask me if I was leaving my spot because I put one kid in her carseat, then the other kid in her carseat, then got in the car, then got each kid a book, then a different book, then got one kid a snack, then called Matt on the cellphone to see if he knew if the power was back on at home or if I should drive the kids to a restaurant--again, not my job to leave a parking spot as quickly as possible so someone else can have it. Have I ever mentioned that I LOOOOOVE to bike to the library with the girls? Weather willing, that's what we'll be doing again tomorrow morning, because come rain or come shine, storytime comes every Tuesday morning.

When is your storytime?

Playroom in Progress

With the advent of the Matt-built rickety shelves and the 40%-off sale on felt-by-the-yard at Joann's this week, the playroom is back in progress. Some inspiration from flickr: 1. house inside house, 2. Dude, I don't think were in Tatooine anymore, 3. Playroom - to your right, 4. playroom, 5. Playroom (image2), 6. orange kids tv room, 7. Playroom with secret door, 8. Playroom, 9. Playroom Bunting, 10. Playroom, 11. Workspace5, 12. Playroom - to your left, 13. Playroom Wall 1, 14. Playroom Bookshelf, 15. children's playroom, 16. nu craft shelf, 17. New craft studio - WIP, 18. craft room 9.07, 19. indie vintage craft room, 20. Flea Market, Thrifted, Recycled...

Now all we have to do is un-rickety the shelves, finish the flooring, make and put up a big felt board, fix the hole I accidentally knocked into the drywall, install a big hinged fold-up-against-the-wall art table, figure out if I want to put up a reading loft or a cargo net for climbing or a tire swing, buy a futon for a guest bed, hang up artwork, and make curtains and a windowseat. See, piece of cake.

...Jiggety Jig

Ah, the joy of being home! We couldn't find the housekey when we arrived home last night around 10:00 pm, but I managed to break in the back door all by myself (hmmm...mental note to FIX said back door this week), and there was only one weird smell in the whole house, from a bag of garbage Matt had put on top of the stove to take out before we left. Ew.

Our collective favorite activity upon homecoming is to collect all the gathered mail, and although neither my order from Dharma Trading Co. nor my swap package for the Christmas in July Stashbuster swap has arrived, my entire order from Dick Blick has made its happy way to our house--and I do mean happy.

We're a family pretty well dedicated to creativity and lifelong learning, so art supplies are dead important to us. Now that we have some serious storage in the basement (as soon as we, um, build the shelves), I chose to invest in some serious art supplies--class packs of markers, crayons, and tempera paint, as well as a few novelties, such as sun printing paper and blank puzzles, and, of course, a gallon jug of Mod Podge for me.

Class packs are actually pretty sweet. The markers and the crayons each contain numerous sets of 16 colors--with two kiddos, I bring out a set for each of them, labelled by kiddo, store the rest, and replenish when necessary. The paint set has a gallon jug for each color, with a lockable pump and a billion little paper cups:
Obviously, though, the box they came in is the funnest toy:Willow had this idea of drawing the entire map of the United States, so I dutifully pulled up a map online for her to copy:Her California looked pretty good actually, perhaps since we've been studying it so much lately; as for the rest of the fifty states--well, she is only four.

In other education news, Montessori starts tomorrow for Will. Our other home projects this week will likely include more map study, identifying some rocks and shells collected in California, helping me create things for a super-big craft fair I'm doing in September, and a trip to the library to check out every color book they have for Syd--I think it's weird that she doesn't have her colors down yet, but Matt thinks I tend to work with both of the girls mostly at Willow's level, and thus I haven't been doing enough color labelling for Sydney. We'll see...