I know, I know ... I still owe everyone the second half of my post on moving, but I haven't been able to sit down, collect my thoughts, and put that much text down on virtual paper this past week. I've been busy. Which means I owe you new reports about all of that, too.
For now, I've got some pictures of our new places. Most of the outdoor photos were taken just after we moved in, while I was waiting for Trueman to get back from getting the moving truck weighed at Fort Eustis, and most of the indoor photos are from today. As you can tell, there's some stuff that's still pretty unfinished. We're missing a desk chair, need to get curtains and curtain rods for all the windows, and the outside needs to meet Mr. Landscaper. The latter is not our responsibility, so it's anyone's guess as to when that will happen.
The front of our duplex.
To state the obvious, our house is the right half of the duplex. It would have been weird to show you a picture of half a house if it weren't our half, wouldn't it? *laughs* As you can see, we don't have any landscaping at the moment, just a mixture of packed dirt and gravel covering our driveway. As far as I know, the current plan is for our landlord to have landscapers gravel the driveway and plant some kind of plants in the rest of the front yard.
I'm thinking about putting potted plants in the space between the front porch and the corner of the building, but I have to admit that I don't know a whole lot about plants and planting, and haven't been known to have a very green thumb. Any suggestions?
The back of our duplex, seen from the middle of the yard.
The same house, seen from the opposite direction - except without our car being parked in the driveway. The white house on the left belongs to an older couple. If it weren't for the fact that we have seen their car pull up to the house, I'd be convinced that nobody lives there. It just seems like their blinds are always down, giving the impression that no one's home.
We're planning to get a little grill and some patio furniture in the near future so we can grill in the back yard and have friends over once it gets more toward summer. We'll need to get a lot of bug repellent, I think.
The back yard, seen from the kitchen door.
Because this is a duplex and neither yard is fenced at this point, we basically share a back yard with our neighbors. Their half is the one on the left, which has a shed, the burn pit, and a bunch of picnic benches. Our half is the one on the right, which doesn't have anything. The thing next to our tree was theirs and has since been removed. Our side is going to have one of those plastic kiddy pools soon - for Abby to play in.
Let's go inside and start with the kitchen.
Our kitchen.
You can probably tell from the photo, but the kitchen isn't a place where we spend a whole lot of time. It's where we make food, do our laundry, and keep most of our pet supplies. We have a washer and dryer combo to the left of the stove, with the hamper in front of it. The white corner at the bottom left is the top of Abby's crate, which is too big to fit anywhere else. To the right of the door you see, we keep our cat boxes, pet food containers, and a small table with the cats' food on top, and the dog's food underneath. Yeah, it's ugly ... but it works.
I love the stove and the refrigerator. The stove being a flat-top range, there are no nooks and crannies for Trueman to drop food into when he cooks, which means it'll keep looking nice. And the fridge is just humongous. I can fit so much frozen stuff into it!
Looking from the kitchen into the living room.
So here's our very yellow living room that you saw in the process of getting painted in the first entry. This is what it looks like all finished. Well, all finished except for curtains, anyway. What you can't see in this picture is the depth. There's about a three foot space behind the couch, which forms a bit of a corridor behind the couch so that we can get to the closet, which is the white door on the right corner. And there's about three feet between the couch and the table next to the front door to get around the room.
Moving along for different views of the living room.
You can see a little more of the living room as well as the stairs leading to the upper floor in this picture. You might also notice the little white box to the right of the pictures on the right side of the photo. That's the digital control for our heating and air conditioning system. I've never lived in a place that had a digital thermostat, so I find that pretty neat.
Moving right along to the bottom of the stairway, here's a wide view of the living room. I realize that the TV is located in a really stupid place, right in front of that window, but that's where the cable hook-up happens to be, so that's how we set up the room. It may not be the most practical place for a TV, but the overall room setup worked out pretty well.
Now let's head upstairs.
Here's a view down the stairway, taken from the upstairs landing. This is the only part of the house where the walls are actually white, and also the least practical place to have white walls because they tend to get scuffed when you carry things upstairs. I bought a little can of flat interior paint to keep on hand so I can paint over any little scuffs or scrapes.
And yeah, that's my pup sleeping at the bottom of the stairway. She's such a funny creature. Even though she has a nice bed in the upstairs bedroom and a bed in the living room downstairs, she prefers sleeping either at the top or at the bottom of the stairway. Meanwhile, Malice the cat has claimed the downstairs dog bed.
Master bedroom.
As you can see, the khaki color we'd chosen for our bedroom walls dried anything but khaki, but the color works pretty well in the room. The view is looking from the hallway into the bedroom. Our dressers fit nicely onto the far wall with a bit of space on either side, and the rest of the furniture fit into the room without making it feel cramped. It actually fits pretty well.
Moving counter-clockwise to get additional views of the room.
This photo is pretty much self-explanatory - it's our bed, headboard, night stands, and all that good stuff. The door on the right goes to Trueman's closet, which is just a little wider than the door itself. It's where his shirts, pants, and such go.
Another view of our bedroom. The book case on the left is where I keep all my manga. The bench on the right is where we kinda put our clothes at night, sit down to put on socks, and such. It's also where the cats love to sleep when they're not on the bed with us. Oh, and I finally do have a place to hang that rug!
And, last but not least, let's head into our office. This is the second bedroom, which is actually about the same size than the master bedroom. That worked out really well, too, because all the stuff that was in the den and the spare bedroom in our old place needed to go into that one room. Because this room is so much bigger, that worked out okay.
Looking into the office from the doorway. Trueman's desk is the one you see, and mine is the white thing in the lower right corner. As you can tell, we're kind of missing a proper office chair for Trueman at this point, but we'll get one this weekend. Like our soccer scarves?
And here's my desk. It's set up pretty much the same way it was in our old place, except that it's next to a closet rather than the door to the living room. Beyond that, same thing. It's even the same wall color.
And this is the "messy" part of the office. You can kind of see a bunch of green wool blankets behind that book case and the foot lockers - those cover the plastic bins of re-enacting gear that we had in our spare bedroom in the old place. It keeps them out of the way, and the cats really like sleeping on top of that. It doesn't look really great, but it's functional. They're also easy to get to, all I have to do is push the book case and footlockers forward.
