After much distraction I am finally getting around to writing Part 2 of
this post. So in case you haven't read
Part 1, go ahead on over
here and check it out.
All right, so we left off with us selling our beloved, beautiful house in San Francisco for a larger "fixer upper" house in the suburbs. Like I said before, we love our current house. It has a lot of history and character and loads of space. But I was miserable the first few months. I started calling this house the ice box. The downstairs has high ceilings and it's really hard to heat. It's great in the summer, but we don't really even need to put the milk in the fridge in the winter. It stays about ten degrees cooler inside our house than outside. And the flimsy windows don't help the situation. I often feel like live in a tent because the windows are so drafty. And they leak. We had a particularly windy, rainy storm this past winter. I am not even joking when I say that 16 out of 20 windows in the house were leaking. I ran around trying to find 16 towels to stop the water.
Let me show you a picture of my fabulous master bathroom.
Try to contain your jealousy. This photo really doesn't show how bright that 50 year old tile is. Our closet of a master shower had a leak and caused this lovely hole in the ceiling of our living room.
My biggest gripe is my kitchen. Here is my kitchen before we moved:
And here's my new kitchen.
If you look closely at the photo above, you can see my washing machine. Every time I use my dryer I have to open the window and let the vent out. Not such a big deal, but I can't put a load of laundry in to dry and go to bed without leaving the window open.
Despite the big picture window above my sink, I like to call my kitchen "the cave." The layout of our house is such that the kitchen it totally cut off from the rest of the house. There really isn't much natural light. As you can imagine, I spend most of my day in the kitchen either cooking something, cleaning something up or getting someone a snack. Life was much different in 1935 when our house was built... the kitchen was not the heart of the home. In our old kitchen, my kids were always within sight while I was cooking. No they are usually clear on the other side of the house in our living room. It drives me nuts. Mr. Mint and I both love to cook and we love to have friends over and cook for them. My San Francisco kitchen inspired me to cook. This one... not so much.
I know I risk sounding like a complete whiner with this post. I do love this house, really I do. We have plenty of space for our family. And we are about to start a major remodel that will update the bathrooms, the windows and expand my kitchen and build a family room among other fantastic things.
I've lived in this house and loved it for almost two years, but it doesn't feel like home yet. It doesn't feel warm and cozy. Everything is in limbo waiting for the remodel. We haven't hung many pictures, bought any new furniture or fixed the hole in our living room ceiling. We haven't really made it our own and I'm ready, so very ready.
The remodel has been a slow road so far. I'll save that story for Part 3.
I did it. I did it. I did it. I posted something on this blog every day in the month of June. 30 day, 31 posts. I even did two posts yesterday. Some of it was crap, some of it wasn't. I used my kids for material quite a bit. I am going to focus on quality rather than quantity for a while. I'm also going to catch up on the five or so books sitting on my nightstand.
