Well, would ya look at that… I checked our calendar today, and guess what?

Day 180, baby!

In Pennsylvania terms, that means Ashar has now completed enough “learning” to be done with sixth grade. I’m not a big fan of that – but hey, I have the required boxes checked accurately on my portfolio-friendly calendar, so no worries, right?

(As an aside, the part that really annoys me is that we can’t start counting our days toward NEXT school year until July 1. Why on earth can you not roll from one into the other – or at least say that you can start with whatever the next calendar month is, or something? How silly. Guess you can tell I’m a fan of learning all the time.)

But I digress. What I actually wanted to do today was share a look at our home, since, you know, we homeschool. Actually, we everywhere-school. We’re antique-store-schoolers, library-schoolers, park-schoolers and car-schoolers, if you want to be precise. But we do spend a good amount of our time at home too, and we just this weekend completed a fun remodeling project that I kind of want to show off.

Plus, I love looking at OTHER people’s houses – there was a super-fun set of posts in that vein on one of my Facebook groups a few weeks ago, and I was in house-voyeur heaven, so I figured, hey, why not share my own!

Today, I’ll show off the main part of the house, and tomorrow, you’ll get a chance to see our remodeling project, so…

Come on in!

Look, it’s the front of our house. You can’t see it, but our flowers are pretty. We just painted the front door green (SPRAY-painted, actually!) We’re THOSE people. Please admire our lovely roof. One of the reasons we could afford a house this size was that with a large house comes a large roof, and this one had never been replaced or repaired and had to be completely redone within a year of moving in. That was exciting.

As were the new heat pump, the new fence, the refinished-after-it-flooded basement and the new hot-water heater in the past seven years. Exciting, that is.

Dining room

This is View 1 of the dining room – which usually doubles as the “table we do stuff on and the piano that everything gets piled on so we can eat” room. Once a week or so it gets “reset” and we mess it up again. I can live with that. 

The storage cubbies toward the center, behind the table, with the plants on them – those are a gift. That’s where everyone’s stuff gets put during the week so it’s not on my counter and so we don’t lose library books! 

The piano has a great story – we got it for $50 plus the cost of tuning, basically a “gift” from the church where my mom, who lives with us, works as administrative assistant. YAY!

This is the dining room from the opposite side. The quote says “The fondest memories are made when gathered around the table.” That sideboard is a total cheat – two base cabinets from Lowe’s plus a piece of precut wood sitting on top of them. Drawer at right is all Ashar’s notebooks and pencils and all that good stuff. The rest holds our silverware, dishes, napkins, pet-care supplies… whatever.

Living room and computer area

Here’s the living room viewed from right inside our front door. (If you look left, you see this; if you look right, you see the view of the dining room with the sideboard visible, seen in the previous photo.) When we moved in, all the floor in these photos was PINK CARPET. No thanks. First chance we got to save up some money, in came the laminate.

Here you can see my daughter looking at her hamster, her cardboard stegosaurus on top of that piece of our entertainment center, and on the mantel you’ll see her pride and joy, our model boat. That’s where we display her current projects – all around this room! (Or, uh, on the piano, mentioned in an earlier picture). The random TV and other junk over there are things we have listed on Craigslist. In the back you can faintly see our globe.

This is our living room seen from the other end. Notice bookcase-as-end-table for sofa. This was ANOTHER attempt to get stuff not piled on my piano. It mostly worked. The weirdest part of our living room (besides its plethora of cats) is the “window” in it. You can see the doorway, but then that other piece is a “window” cut into the wall and opening into our entry hallway. See next picture for a look through the window.

Family photo wall! Don’t judge that they’re a little crooked. 🙂 This is looking through the “fake window” in the living room – the stained glass piece was made by my mom, and we love having somewhere to hang it, even if it’s kinda wack to have a window in the middle of a room.

This is our “desk,” AKA our former kitchen table. This dining area is what you see when you look straight in our front door, and if you look at the living room pictures, you can see how this fits between it and the kitchen. We’re laptop users, but this is where we tend to dock, where the printer sits, where the paper is, etc. That counter to our right is usually piled with junk. I had just done one of my every-so-often cleanups when I took the photo. Sorry, I’m not THAT honest 🙂

Kitchen

There used to be a cabinet hanging over that extended counter, with just a “pass-through” below it. VERY dark (all the cabinets were dark brown wood at the time, too, before we repainted) and very enclosed. 

One day, my husband came home from work to find me standing on the counter with a crowbar and my 70-something mom apparently going to “catch” the cabinet when I pried it loose. (He quickly decided to help.)

Also in this photo you can see yet more of our wall lettering; we’re sort of addicted. The good thing about our kitchen is that it’s large; the bad thing is, it’s really inconvenient, the fridge and microwave are way down there in never-never land. In my dream world, we’d build a first-floor laundry room down there (to the right of the fridge is a full bath with shower, so there’s good water hookups!) 

PS – Who builds a full bath off their kitchen??

Here’s the main part of the kitchen. One thing you can’t see real well is our “backsplash.” It was horrible white linoleum (which the counters still are) but it was just gross. So, we came up with the only way we could afford to replace it… we stuck self-stick vinyl floor tile all over it. Yes, really. People compliment it pretty often. But it’s floor tile.

That’s all for tonight… make sure to check back tomorrow to see our basement “remodeling” project!