Our House

I'll be honest, I probably wouldn't have unpacked an decorated my house as fast as I did if I wasn't looking forward to showing it off in this post.  Also decorating a house is one of my favorite parts of moving. It's always really fun to turn a house into our home by putting our stuff into it. This house has been extra fun because we actually own this one!  

I'm so excited to show this house off to you all.  Think of this like a virtual housewarming party. And if any of you live within driving distance feel free to come over for an in person tour.  Seriously, we would love to have you over. 

Before we get into the tour we have to take a minute and honor a very special person - Aubrey Owens. Aubrey and his wife LaDora were the first, and only owners of this house. Aubrey passed away from cancer in May. Shortly after his passing his wife and children decided to sell the house. I know they spent sometime getting the house painted and a few other things ready for the sale, but overall the house was in excellent shape from Aubrey's care. We are very, very thankful to have a chance to continue taking care of a house that has been well maintained.

We keep finding things that Aubrey did for the house. Many of them make me think that he and Brandon would have been good friends if they'd had a chance to know each other. These labeled water piped are a prime example of the care and dedication Aubrey put into this house.   

Alright, now let's get onto the tour.  

This is what our house looked like from the outside.  You can see the garage in the back of this picture.  When we were looking at houses online we couldn't see the garage in the main picture.  I wasn't sure if we just wanted a carport so I almost skipped over this house.  But I clicked on the picture anyway and was happy to see the garage.

 Right now there is a garden bed full of rocks in front of the house.  We are going to take out the rocks and put in lots of plants.  I've already added a brick pathway leading off of the porch because I like being able to walk that way when I am heading to the school.

Here is the living room from the front door. I was worried that our large rug wouldn't fit in this room so I had Brandon come over to the house and measure it for me.  The measurements said the rug would fit, but I was still a little skeptical.  It wasn't until we were moved in that I realized how truly big this room is. The rug fits just fine.  We are still hunting for a sofa to go in the living room.  I'm being way more picky than I should be given our limited budget, but I really don't want to settle for just any couch.  So we might have a big open living room for a while. Oh and yes that is a dog in the picture with the kids. We are pupp-ysitting my friend Sarah's dog Lemon this weekend.  Lemon is a practice dog for the one we will eventually get. 

 We've had these green bookcases ever since our Logan townhouse.  When we moved into this house the guys who helped us bring them in put one of the bookcases up in what I considered as "upsidedown."  But the more I looked at it, the more I realized I like having the big open space at the top.  So I left it like that and made the space into a decorative area.  I also only put out books that we would actually read. All the text books are no longer on display.  There are whole shelves full of books for the kids. I'm hoping they will get in the habit of reading books that they find on these shelves.

Here's a peek into the kitchen/dining room, but we wont going in there yet.  I do want to point out the curtains.  I found these yesterday at Goodwill.  (In another life they were a shower curtain.)  I was thrilled to find something that matched the green in the living room and the red in the kitchen WITHOUT looking like a Christmas decoration. 

Here's the view of the living room from the hall.  It's a great room.  Oh and look at that floor.  We are loving having wood floors.  I've been stockpiling rugs for several years in the hopes that I'd have a house with wood floors.  And I finally have one!

 Let's go down the hall next.  But first let's look at how much my kids love having a dog around.

 This is the hallway down to the bedrooms. It's kind of hard to tell, but the ceilings in the house all angle up to follow the roof line. The hallway is in the center of the house so the ceiling is about 12 feet tall in the hallway.

 The first room on the right is Veronica's room.  She has been sharing with Charlotte and Lydia for the past three years. That went fairly well, but lately we felt like she needed to be separate from the twins. She has different interests than the twins and arguments were breaking out over who was leaving the room messy. So for the good of everyone Veronica gets her own room.

 Veronica gets Derrick's bed (you'll see why when we look at Derrick's room).  She loves all the space under it.  Her curtains used to be our dining room curtains.  I folded them over and basted them to make them shorter.

 And this picture is inspiring me to put more art up on Veronica's walls. That dresser looks really sad and lonely.

 Across the hall from Veronica's room is the bathroom.  It has a tub in it, but it's really hard to take pictures of bathrooms so I just took this one and moved on.

The next bedroom on the right is Charlotte and Lydia's room. They are really happy to have Veronica out of their room and are taking it to extremes. The put this sign up the night we move in.

 They decided to take their bunkbeds down for the first time ever.  Here they are modeling how they sleep every night.  (Not really, but we all thought it was funny.) This is the cleanest their room was all week.

 Here's the room looking at the closet. They have a bulletin board and
Lydia is already filling it up with her drawings.

Mine and Brandon's room is across the hall from the Twins room.  There are some wonky things about the room, namely the fact that we can't quite figure out how to make our bed work with the window, but I'm happy with this room because it FITS my KING size bed.  Ultimately nothing else matters. 

 It also fits our giant dresser.  And there is a large closet. So I'm happy.

 We also have our own bathroom. After sharing a bathroom with the kids for nearly three years, this is heaven!

Okay let's go back to the kitchen/dining room. My one complaint about this house is that we basically have an eat in kitchen.  But all the positives of the house outweigh this one negative.  So I can live with this.  We're making it work. We have a bench on the other side of the table so when we eat we pull the table out and two kids sit over there. Then we push it back when we are done. I keep telling myself that this is better than the dining room table/bed that we had in the RV. 

 The room has this interesting brick wall. When I looked at pictures of the house I wondered if it was that wallpaper that looks like brick.  But no, it's real brick.  I don't really know why it's there since it isn't the outside wall or part of the fireplace.  But it is pretty.  The door in the brick wall leads to a large storage cupboard. Part of our long term plan for the house is to take out the wall, the cupboard, and possibly even relocate the staircase to make more room for a real dining room.  But all that can wait.  For now I'm appreciating how pretty the brick is.

 Here are all of the kitchen cupboards. I know they aren't trendy or anything, but they are solid and in great shape, so I'm not in any hurry to replace or paint them.

The side door is off of the kitchen/dining room. We have the kids' backpack and coat hooks out here. 

 The staircase turns and goes down to the basement.

 Here is the large family room. It takes up about 1/3 of the basement. As you can see we haven't fully finished decorating down here. 

 We have a second amazing fireplace.  Right now it's buried under boxes of DVD's. 

 We got rid of our second hand TV before we moved.  When we moved in Brandon used some of the money he got as graduation presents to buy a projector for under $100.  He's wanted one of these for YEARS.  He also bought a new DVD player and a speaker.  He hooked everything up yesterday.

 Right now we are using a white sheet as a screen, but Brandon has plans to put up something better in the future.

 Brandon is so proud of his home movie theater. (The kids were watching one of the Ice Age movies when I took this picture.)

Here is a view of the family room from the other side of the room.  As you can see we still have a lot of toys and blankets to organize. I'm hoping to get to those sometime this next week. 

 The far end of the room has a display case.

 I didn't really know what to put in here, so for now it has some random things like lego creations and pinewood derby cars.

Derrick's room is off of the family room. There isn't carpet in the basement so our dinning room rug has found a new home here. 

 Derrick's room has a built in bed with a ladder. I was a little worried about putting Derrick down in the basement by himself, but he's fine with it.  In fact the first time we saw this house with the realtor, Derrick walked in here and said, "This is Derrick's room." So yeah, he's cool with being down here.

 He loves having somewhere to put his trophy and his model train stuff.

The other half of the basement is the "unfinished" side. Here's our laundry room.

 Mount laundry is already growing and this table will never be cleared off again.

 There are also some nice storage shelves in the laundry room.  We have holiday decorations and food storage on the shelves.  And as you can see this is where we have the kennel for Lemon. Eventual Dog will probably sleep here too.

 The third bathroom for the house is off of the laundry room. It's a really nice bathroom - especially when compared to our last basement bathroom.

 The final section of the basement is the "craft room."  This still needs a lot of organization, but I've already used my sewing machine several times.  I LOVE that I can just leave it set up and plugged in, but I don't have to look at it unless I am in this room.

Okay, let's go outside. 

Here is the wonderful two car garage. 

This is also an organization project in progress, but Brandon is already so in love with this space. There is so much room.  And so many good shelves and pegboard already in place.  There is even a heater mounted to the ceiling. You can't really see it, but our GIANT dining room table is leaning up against the wall in the back corner.  I didn't really know how big this garage was until we put the table into the garage. That table has always looked huge, but in this garage it looked tiny.

The garage has a covered patio on one side. 

 And there is also this uncovered patio.  The kids have been riding their bikes all over the patios and the driveway since the day we got here.

 The patio reminds me of one that my great grandparents had in their backyard. You can't really see it in this picture, but the ground is cement that was poured in individual sections.  I can just imagine the hours it took to mix the cement and pour it by hand. 

 Oh and we also have a lava rock fountain.  When we first moved in my sister Hillary figured out how to turn the water on my accident, but we haven't figured it out since.  We plan to add some potted plants back here.

 Behind the patio is a whole second half to the yard. This is where I'm going to put our garden.

 There is also a second garage of sorts behind the main garage.

 Our neighbors say that Aubrey restored old cars and so needed lots of shop space. I don't even know what we'll do with this. But it's cool to have it. My sister Hillary joked that this is what we could have bought in Utah for what we paid for our house in Twin.

 This is the view of the back yard from almost the back fence.  We have almost a quarter of an acre.

 We also have some rosebushes and decorative trees back here.  I'm excited to see them flower in the spring.

 Oh and there is a little shed next to the patio (because I guess there wasn't enough storage space as it was). This is going to be my garden shed.

And that's the house.

In addition to a great house we happened to move into a great neighborhood. We've already met all the neighbors who live around our house.  Our next door neighbor is close to my age and we've already been to a Relief Society Activity together.  She lives with her mother who is Veronica's primary teacher.

The location is great too. We are within two blocks of the Elementary school  and the middle school is about the same distance the other direction.  We are within walking distance of a grocery store too. (Brandon and the kids walked there the other night to get gas for the lawn mower.)  We even happened to find a house that is a few blocks away from Derrick's behavioral therapy office.  (That was completely unplanned.)

Our ward has already impressed us. We've been in good wards, but this ward is on a whole other level. The Relief Society Activity I went to had at least 30 women in attendance.  And most of them introduced themselves to me.  The bishopric has already come to visit.  The bishop is being very proactive with addressing some of Derrick's needs in Primary.  Just the fact that 10 people showed up to help us unload our moving truck was impressive enough.  I can't wait to see what else this ward has in store.

I'm not entirely sure why we are here in Twin Falls, but having a house as great as this one is making me realize that we are exactly where we need to be right now. I don't know if we'll stay here forever, but right now I certainly hope we do. 

Thanks for reading! And seriously, let me know if you want to come visit.




PS

While I was waiting for the pictures to upload I looked up all the posts I wrote when we moved into other homes.  I thought I'd share the links for those of you who are on bedrest or otherwise in need of entertainment. 

Pocatello House: http://illguthlife.blogspot.com/2017/09/our-newest-new-house.html

RV: http://www.51centadventures.com/2017/05/rv-update-reveal.html

Alabama House: http://illguthlife.blogspot.com/2015/05/tour-of-my-house.html

Texas House: http://illguthlife.blogspot.com/2013/02/our-home.html

Bountiful Utah Apartment (downstairs): http://illguthlife.blogspot.com/2012/03/through-looking-glass.html

Boutiful Utah Apartment (upstairs): http://illguthlife.blogspot.com/2010/09/so-this-is-where-i-live.html

Logan Townhouse: http://illguthlife.blogspot.com/2008/11/my-town-house.html