On the Farm

Tonight will be our 3rd sleep in the new house. It's still pretty surreal that this place is ours.

Amidst the hustle and bustle of moving day activities, Uncle Doug took the kids on a blackberry-picking expedition. There are enough blackberry bushes bordering our property to keep us picking for h-o-u-r-s. So, if anyone's looking for a good place to pick...

We've also made other great discoveries on the yard. There are several fruit trees - a few apple trees, a pear tree, a yellow plum and a purple plum tree. The plums are in full production right now and are dee-licious :)

Now, onto the house...

The living space leaves a lot to be desired, but it's totally functional for our family right now. Right now there are boxes everywhere and I feel like I'm making very slow progress. Erik's been busy doing outdoor jobs and helping renovate the downstairs suite, so the unpacking and childcare has been mostly up to me.

So, here's the first glimpse of the living space for Erik & I and the kids, which is in the upstairs of the house.

The living room is actually quite spacious even if the paint colours are not quite my style (the walls are either icy blue or dark navy). The only improvement I've made is tearing down the window treatment since I took this picture.

Oh and cleaning up some of the toys :)

This is the back wall of the living room. The brick has been painted in the same lovely shade of ice blue. The fireplace is no longer functioning so somebody decided to custom build and paint that little floral insert...

She's a beauty.

This is our sunroom - a.k.a the dining room, since our table will not fit anywhere else in the house. Right now it looks like this - until Erik can find the screws that fit the table legs onto the table top... These window treatments have since been removed. I wasn't really digging the plaid and floral country motif.

This wall of cabinets banks one whole side of the sunroom. Not pretty by any means, but jeepers - are they ever practical! I've already hidden tons of stuff in there, and there's still plenty of room to spare.

In between the living room and the sunroom is the kitchen.

Yes, there is a fireplace in the kitchen.

And there is also a whole lotta brick.

I took this picture yesterday morning...

And this one yesterday evening. Did I make any progress? A little. The window treatment is gone and I think there are a few less boxes on the floor...

The kitchen's biggest downfall, in my opinion? The lack of a dishwasher. This is the first time in my 10 years of married life that I have been without one. After the amount of dishes I've been doing already in the last few days, I'm not sure I'll last too much longer without one...

Now if you were standing in my kitchen as above and did a 360, this is what you would see on the other side. To the left is the door to the sunroom, to the right is the hallway to the living room. This area was used by the previous owners for their kitchen table, but since that won't really work for us, it'll probably be the home office (a.k.a "random space to put random things").

Now, because we only have two bedrooms in the upstairs for our family of five, we decided to give the kids the master bedroom. It's a large room and it will have to double as their play space since we don't have a lot of room in this house.

I was getting tired of waiting around for Erik to help me move some heavy things, so I took it upon myself to get this area rug in here. Believe me, that thing was stinkin' heavy.

And awkward.

But, wow does it ever make it more cozy... Erik still needs to set up the kids loft beds which I hope will help with the toy storage issue in this room. I'm thinking I need LOTS of shelves.

And this is the mess I'm dealing with by the kid's closet. It's a bit overwhelming - mostly because I just don't know where to put this stuff.

Yes. Shelves are a must.

And here is our one and only upstairs bathroom. The kids were super pumped about the palm tree toilet seat cover. And the previous owners were kind enough to leave the matching shower curtain too...

Yeah. The curtain had to go.

This one from Superstore is a big improvement. The toilet seat will have to stay as-is until we put in a new toilet.

And here is the smallest room in the house - our "master" bedroom. We tried to fit our HUGE Hemnes dresser from IKEA in here and the only way it would work was to have it at the end of our bed - like one gi-normous foot board. The idea wasn't all that bad, but it was just a little weird and awkward. (This picture was taken post-dresser move).

In the end I decided to give the kids the big dresser (after all, they needed one) and create a bit more space in our room - especially since we needed a bit of room for Silas' playpen (he'll be sleeping in here until I'm brave enough to try to put him in the kids room).

And we settled for one of Mom & Dad Toews' extra dressers, which is small but pretty. The bedroom has turned out to be my favourite room in the house so far.

Probably because I don't feel the stress and panic of mountains of boxes when I'm in there.

The consensus between the 4 of us owners is that building a new house on the property might be our best option - though not in the immediate future. So, in the meantime we'll do very minimal improvements. I may decide to paint a few of the walls (namely the navy blue and the deep red) but we'll have to wait and see.

Some more extensive work had to be done in the bottom floor to make it workable for Erik's parents. I'll have to share the befores and afters of that space another time.

Really, it's the outdoor space that is irreplaceable. I don't think it's really sunk in for any of us just what we have here!

So, I hope you enjoyed your first tour of the farm. Stay tuned for many related posts to come! And now that I'm reaching the end of this post, exhaustion has hit in full-force... My ability to write anything coherent is quickly diminishing... So, since I cannot bear to keep my eyes open for 1 more minute, I'm off to enjoy a little down-duvet and memory-foam action...