The new house: 6 months in

We've just passed the 6 month anniversary of moving in to our new house. Wow! 

So are we settled in? Yes.

Do we love our house? Yes.

Have we finished all the work? No!!!

The house is everything I wanted it to be, a nice large space for the kids to run around (which they take full advantage of!), they have a separate playroom which they use to the maximum, I especially enjoy 'rest time' when I can put a DVD on for them after lunch, shut the door and not see them for a little while. It's not a magic room, Laila will always appear after a maximum of 30 minutes and demand attention from her parents. Max, will not, he'd be happy to sit in there and watch DVD's all afternoon if we let him!

the playroom

Their bedrooms are great, plenty of space for toys and jumping around or lying down and playing. My work space is opposite their rooms, so sometimes I can get on with work while they play in their rooms, but this nearly always ends with them wanting to "help" me on the computer, so I quickly give up any idea of working while they're around!

The kitchen is really great, lots of countertop space (which I was lacking before), enough to have 2 helpers when we're baking! The italian shower is amazing and a real luxury to wash in every day.

So I've mentioned all this "space", well before you get too envious, there is a down side....the cleaning!!! There is definitely more cleaning to do! And my nice modern light grey floor tiles? Well they show the dirt far too quickly! So in theory I need to mop them every other day, but I only manage this once a week in reality! And when we do get sunshine, which does happen between the rain showers, well we get lots and lots of light, but all I see is the dust, the marks on the windows and every speck of dirt the sun likes to point out to me!

I would talk about the garden and patio space, which is a lovely size and a nice regular shape. We can see it all from one of the 3 sets of patio doors, so if the kids are out there we can see them. However, I can't remember the last time they were actually able to play out there! The garden, like everyone else's here, is absolutely sodden with rainwater. I don't remember the last day we had without rain...Luckily they get enough playtime at school, so I don't worry about getting them outside when we're home. Or if it's not raining we take them out on their bikes either round our street or to the cycle track.

I love how we can walk to school, but again, there's a "however". Most mornings I have to go to work after dropping them off, so I need to drive them to school so I can get to work on time, and I could walk to collect them in the afternoon, BUT Max can't (or won't) walk back up the hill (it is very steep) after a long day at school, not yet. So either I take the pushchair for him, or I end up taking the car to make life easier!

And I mentioned the work wasn't finished? Well since we moved in we have managed to finish off the kitchen by adding the baseboards under the cupboards, put up the shelves and some pictures on the walls, and we treated our staircase with the correct vitrification. We also got the garage sorted and put most of our junk storage up in the attic. We still haven't painted our downstairs shower room or any of our 'ready-to-paint' doors, or finished putting the skirting boards back inside in the cupboards, we still have a stack of photo frames and picture frames to sort through and hang. We'd like to add some tiles around the kitchen sink and the toilet sink, we'd like to carry on the garden work, start a vegetable garden, plant more plants, sort out the front garden, build a little wall using all the stones we have...etc.etc. the list goes on and on. 

So one day, when the rain stops and we finally find some of that miraculous stuff called "time", then we might, just might get started on this list! I'll check in again when we reach the one year anniversary and see if we've made any progress.