Our New Place

Here is a picture of our new place!

The big black rectangles are not part of the picture... I added them to cover up the numbers!

It looks awesome, right?  hahaha... Don't worry... the outside appearance is deceiving--it looks much better inside.  And on Monday, they are painting the outside so that it looks prettier, too.  Our next-door neighbors also rent from the same guy, and their house looks pretty outside, so I think ours will look nice when it's all done!

I love our new place, but I also seriously hate it.  As with every place we've lived, there are pros and cons, but this place seems to have much more extreme pros and cons.  For example, a major pro--the place is huge... easily twice the size of our last place.  The playroom alone is twice as big as our living room at our last house, which functioned as living room, playroom, and computer room.  So the girls' playroom here is gigantic.  I LOVE it.

Now for a major con... and I mean MAJOR--the bathrooms.  Just everything about them.  They are so terrible.  I'd rather have the bathrooms from our old place, complete with the roaches (Both live and dead!  When we moved into our last place, there were layers of dead roaches & other bugs in the bathroom cabinets.  It was extremely disgusting.).  I thought I couldn't hate a bathroom more than I hated our old bathroom, but I was wrong.  These bathrooms are seriously terrible.  Here are some photos to show you what I mean:

See the toilet hiding back there in the corner?

Notice that the sink is turned the wrong way.

So ridiculously cramped.

They actually had to cut a hole in the wall to get the toilet to fit.

Idiots.

Those pictures are of the master bathroom, which is the worst of the two bathrooms.  It's basically unusable.  And by the way, because it's so bad, we haven't been using it at all, so I didn't bother to clean it when we moved in.  So all the mess & dirt is from the construction... they don't always do a very good job of cleaning up.  Anyway, what they should have done with the master bath was make it into a bathroom with a shower instead of a tub.  The owner wanted it to be a full bathroom since it was the "master bathroom", but instead, he has basically made it just a tub.  Because that's really the only part of the bathroom that we can use.  I can barely, just barely, fit into the space to get back to the toilet.  But once you're back there, you can't move.  And your left side is being smashed against the wall.  The sink is turned the wrong way, so you can't look in the mirror and use the sink unless you stand in front of the toilet and use the sink sideways.  It's completely idiotic and ridiculous, and I wish the person who designed it could be forced to use it for even just one day to show them how stupid they are.  Did you notice in the picture that they actually had to CUT A HOLE IN THE WALL to make the toilet fit into the space?!  Oh, and to top it all off, there is NO storage.  Not a single cabinet.  Not a single shelf.  Nothing.  In either bathroom.  And there's no space to put anything in.  So. Freakin. Stupid.

The other bathroom is a TINY bit better.  But it's still pretty bad.  You're at least not being smashed against a wall when you sit, and the sink is turned the correct way.  And the toilet fit without the need for any holes in the walls.  But poor Naomi hunches over when she is trying to get to the toilet, because she has hit her head numerous times on the sink as she was trying to get to the potty.  It makes me so sad!  And so very angry.

Anyway, so that's the biggest negative.  It's bad enough that we never would have rented this place if we had seen what the bathrooms would be like.  But at least none of the other cons for the place are so bad.  They are more like annoyances that we'll just get over or get used to.  Or they are minor issues that I can fix by spending a few dollars at Walmart on a helpful gadget.

Well now that I've gone on and on about the terrible bathrooms, I will tell you about more of the pros for the place, before you feel too bad for us!  I already mentioned the space, but seriously, it deserves being mentioned again.  It's HUGE.  We were used to a teeny, tiny little townhouse with absolutely no storage.  We have 4 bedrooms here, a nice-sized living room and kitchen, and tons of closets.  There's a closet in the living room, and in that closet is another closet.  There's a closet in the big hallway/open middle area of the house.  Then there's another closet in the hallway, and that closet is super big.  There's a pantry/closet in the kitchen.  There's a closet in each bedroom, and the girls' closet is almost a double closet.  There are two closets in the master bedroom--one is just a single closet, and the other one is super big.  So there is tons of storage space, which is SO nice after having almost no storage in the last place we lived!

We have granite counter tops and marble floors in the kitchen, and we also have marble floors in the bathroom.  They're super pretty.  And I love the windows--they're all huge.  So the place is sunny and bright and happy.

The street we live on & the surrounding streets are pretty nice, and everyone around has been super friendly.  There's a really cute playground 3 blocks away which was just redone.  There's a huge park just a mile away, which is so pretty.  I love it.  And the houses on the streets around the park are GORGEOUS.  I'm trying to convince Jacob to take us all for a walk around the park tomorrow after church!

Oh, the air conditioning!  I love it so much.  To compare, at our crappy townhouse in Columbia, our air conditioning was so bad.  It would run all day and all night, and if it turned off at all, it wasn't until maybe 4 or 5 in the morning when it would FINALLY get down to the temperature we set it to.  For most of our summer days, the temperature in our house would be between 75 and 78 by mid-afternoon.  And the downstairs was always at least 5 degrees cooler than upstairs.  So if you wanted to be comfortable at all when sleeping, you had to let the air conditioning run until the main floor was down in the 60s.  Our utility bills in the summer were insanely high since the air conditioner would run all day and all night just to keep the place somewhat cool.  I'm talking like we could rent another apartment for the amount we paid the utility company every month.  But our air conditioner here is AMAZING!  I love it so much.  It turns on, and runs for a few minutes, and then turns off.  And if I set it to 72, it gets the temperature to 72, and it stays there!  And for the majority of the time, it's not even running.  Amazing!

Our beautiful thermostat!

I wasn't going to post any photos until all of the construction was done and everything was unpacked and organized and looking awesome... but that could be a while.  Maybe a long while.  So I'm giving in to the people who have asked for pictures--Here are a few photos of our place looking kinda terrible!  This way, when you see it all finished, you'll appreciate it more... right? :)

Here are the kitchen counters and floor... I just took a picture of the corner of the counter, because all of our counters are still covered with boxes/things that I have to put away.  And I haven't bothered sweeping or mopping yet since construction guys have been coming in and out all day every day, so the floor is a mess.  But it's pretty, huh?

Marble floors!

Pretty counter tops!

The last room I tried to take pictures of was the playroom.  I have been cleaning that room twice a day, but it is still a disaster area.  We have nothing to organize toys, so they all get thrown into a bin, which just gets dumped again 20 minutes after I clean it.  I plan on getting something to organize the toys as soon as I can.

I hung my PLAY signs, but they are bugging me.  One, they look so small.  They're each 10-inch squares, which seemed so big when I was making them, but on the huge wall, they look kinda silly.  And I think I need a 5th square, to make it more even.  Oh well!

Anyway, there you go!  Give me another week or two, and we'll have the place looking awesome.  I hope. :)