The family room

Come on down and check out our roomy family room.

Here is what you see coming down the stairs. Not in the shot is the door to the unfinished part of the basement.

Here is the train table. Note the roominess and the space surrounding it. We are thinking of (for now) keeping it as just a play table. The boys seem to enjoy having their toys on elevated surfaces.

That white cabinet in the back was put in by the former owners. It shows their bad planning and poor attention to detail. I would take pictures of the inside, but I don't want to gross you out. The spiders seem to really like it. As you can see we have tons of toy storage. I think that the toys were breeding while they were packed up, I don't remember having this many toys when we were living in California.

More storage for books and toys.

Remember how I said that I would not get a house with these awful stairs? Well I did. We are not going to make the under stairs area a storage space like it was in our previous house which is the only way I talked myself into not hating these stairs.

This is the adult section of the room. The entertainment system is just past the computer desk in the corner. My tech savvy husband hooked the computer to the TV so that we can watch movies from the computer on our TV. The kids love watching my husband play computer games on the big TV.

Look we have couches! They are real leather and they are not super overstuffed either.

Call me

I have a sneaking suspicion that AT&T has sold our number to some telemarketers. *grr* We have been receiving telemarketing calls almost from the moment that our number was connected. My husband and I have not been giving our number out freely since we have not yet managed to memorize it. We have to keep looking it up on my cell phone when we want to give it out to someone.

I also have the feeling that the number is cursed (aka they did not wait long enough before reissuing it). During the first few days we kept getting calls for another person, the same person every time. This has happened to us before and it was a pain in the bum. When we lived in San Diego we kept getting some guy from prison trying to get us to accept a collect call. He thought he was calling his girlfriend but I am pretty sure that she was not all that thrilled about him being in jail since she changed her number and didn't tell him. I was not about to accept a collect call just to apprise him of that fact so whenever that number showed up on the caller ID we let it go to our answering machine. It was a relief to move since the guy was pretty dense and never figured out that he was dumped and she wanted no further contact from him.

Another factor in the cursing is that we have also received an unusual number of wrong number calls. Just today I fielded a call from a guy that wanted to know if we stocked tapes for micro recorders. Sadly we did not have any in stock. I will have to remember to get some next time we are ordering.

We did it!

My husband and I finally purchased couches for our home. We went to every furniture store in the area and ended up going back to the first store and buying two matching sofas and a love seat. They are a little more fluffy than I would have picked out on my own, but they will not swallow you whole every time you sit down. They arrive on Saturday and I can't wait to sit in something besides camping chairs.

Finally pictures of the house!

People have been harassing me for these and I finally got my act together enough to take some pictures of the house. The ones that I took after our offer was accepted were so bad that I did not want to post them. I plan on taking interior pictures as we finish up our unpacking.

Unpacking has been slow due to the loss of motivation and the fact that we have to somehow scare up couches for our living room and family room. The ones we bought before we got married seven (yes seven, time sure flies and my anniversary just happened on the 15th) years ago were rather sad looking so we did not move them with us. The big hang up is that my husband prefers the man eating over stuffed couches and I prefer a slimmer more classic looking couch. It may take us some time to reconcile our differences. I think the only reason we were able to agree on a couch before was that we were not married and my husband was eager to please his wife to be.

Here is the front of the house. As you can see there is a very nice mature tree in the front. There is also a poor lonely maple that I feel may have been badly placed. The previous owners seemed to really like maple trees, there are two others that are rather young in the back yard. Apparently they are great for Kansas since they bend well with the heavy winds. In case you can't tell the house is a creamy yellow and a sage green, colors that I would have picked had I been picking the color the house paint.

The back of the house. Thrilling huh? My husband is itching to put a brick patio next to the steps.

Here is the side area of the back yard. There is a concrete pad there where we are planning on keeping the kiddy pool. I want to get some sort of shade there so that the kids to not burn in the sun.

Of all the things that were left behind this annoyed me the most but thrilled the kids the most. While they were in Utah they got a taste for trampoline jumping while at their cousin's house. I need to find some sort of step stool so that they can get up and down on their own. I know that we will not be moving it with us nor will we leave it for the renters (too much of a chance of injury and being sued). You can also see a very annoyingly placed maple tree. It is right near the power line to the house. One of the things I plan on doing before long is digging it up and moving it to a better place in the yard.

Here is a closeup of the dirt work we had done. We are trying to sprout grass on it but are being bad at remembering to keep it moist. If nothing sprouts soon I am going to get some sod to keep the rain from washing the dirt away.

If anyone can tell me what this plant is I would be very happy. I know I have some readers out there that are gardening nuts.

Whew

It turns out that the termite scare was nothing much. The pesky bugs tried to make inroads in the garage, but were stopped by a cold winter. Not much damage was done and you can be sure that we will be spraying to keep it that way.