Our Little Blue House

For quite a few blogs now, I've told you guys all about our new house. We closed nearly a month ago, and this place is just starting to feel like home. I unpacked the very last of my boxes, but make no mistake, it's still pretty chaotic with stuff everywhere. But, I figure it's time to provide some photographic evidence of our new house! 

The boys didn't get to visit the house (at least the inside) before we closed, so after we got the keys, we picked them up and headed on over. Our house is blue, in case you didn't catch that. We have a cute little front porch and some (nonfunctional) shutters. It's kind of adorable. (The yard is a bit overgrown and needs a ton of work, though). 

Calib will likely live in this house the least out of everyone, but he still got to unlock the door for the very first time. 

This is our front living space. We're going for a home school type room in there. 

Walking through the pillars, to your left, is our kitchen. It's not huge, but it might as well be in comparison to our tiny little congregation of cabinets we had in our old house. I also love that it isn't white. We don't have white walls- or white counter tops- or white tile. It's a much welcome change. 

In the back of the house, you have our family room. The door on the left there is mine and Asa's bedroom. The big doorway on the right goes to the boy's bathroom, Calib's bedroom, and Peyton and Hayden's bedroom. While we have four bedrooms, the last one is being used as an office, because it was getting increasingly difficult for Asa to work out in the open, right next to the front door, with the kids going in and out and working on things. So our office is in the back of the house on the right, opposite our bedroom. 

My favorite thing about the house is probably the french doors in the back of the house, that leads to our very nice screened in back patio. 

 

Every room was painted, except for Peyton and Hayden's. (Calib's is the pretty green color). That was fine because I had big plans for their room (it's still a work in progress). 

But there was no time to work on all of that, because we had places to be. The day after we closed we spent two days at Universal Studios with my cousin and her family. 

We got home around lunch time on Thursday, and headed over to the new house to take a few car loads of boxes, clean up a bit,  and hang some curtains. I had bought them long ago on an awesome Kohl's sale, so I just had to use my best judgement to get them to match. I actually did a really good job. 

But, by Saturday, Peyton Calib and I were gone again- and off to Denver. We went to the Rocky Mountain National Park, the Denver Mint, Red Rocks, and the Bronco's stadium. 

Meanwhile, Asa and Hayden stayed behind to move boxes, and get some moving things done. They also ate a lot of food. 

But, it was well deserved after all the work they did. They also visited the Lodge (our neighborhood's Clubhouse), and got Asa's ID card. I still have yet to get mine. I haven't even been up to the lodge yet. I'm sure I'll get there, and then I'll share more about that with you all. It's a pretty cool place- with lots to offer. 

There's a playground, tennis courts, a basketball court, a couple of pools (one is heated!), hot tubs, a movie theater, a game room, and a nature center- where these little guys live. Peyton is old enough to volunteer to help take care of the residents at the nature center, so he's been looking forward to settling in, and doing that. 

We got home VERY early Friday morning (the 17th). I had missed Asa's weekend though, and by Tuesday our plan was to get to the first of two trucks (I'll get to that in a minute). That gave me basically four days to get anything I wanted to get done in the house before our furniture was moved over. It wasn't a lot, especially when I had been gone for a week and we needed groceries, and utilities changed over (whats with the water company making you drive all the way to New Port Richey, blah!) Plus, we were less than a week away from Thanksgiving, so all of that needed planning.Not to mention the plumber, and the bug guy, and the cable guy coming out. And then there was a couple of dental appointments in there too. It was a little overwhelming, even for me, and I'm a planner. I just tried to take it one project at a time (and I still am!) 

I did manage to get the tile down on the bottom of all of our cabinets. They were a little icky, so this did the job, at least for now. 

But mostly, painting was on the agenda. Luckily, Peyton and Hayden's room was the only one that had white walls. And, I was only painting two and a half walls anyway. See, I felt kind of bad about getting a four bedroom house, and still making Peyton and Hayden share. But, we really do need the office with how much Asa works from home. Plus, Peyton likes to stay up and play computer at night, and now he's in there not bothering anyone, which is also kind of nice. But, since they still had to share, I told them I would make their room super awesome. We all decided to go with a Harry Potter theme, and it's still a work in progress, but it's getting there, and it's turning out pretty awesome. The first step, though, was getting rid of the white walls. So Saturday I spent painting. 

The office was the other room that needed some paint. I guess I never took a before picture, but it had this wallpaper boarder about a foot from the ceiling, and above the wall paper was white. The wall paper was awful, so we took it down, and then got Lowes to match the paint they best they could, so I'd only have to paint that top foot. If I'm looking at it just right, I can tell the paint is off a bit. But nobody else in the house notices, and now with stuff on the wall, it's even harder to tell. Later, when I picked up more paint for another project, I thanked the Lowe's paint lady for matching it so well. 

It was weird to come home from Colorado with souvenirs and have nowhere to put them, so I just brought my bag of magnets over with me, so all my Denver one's were the first on the fridge. 

And, like I said, it was Thanksgiving week, so there was plenty of room in the fridge for the turkey. We actually brought over stuff for the fridge every time we made a trip- so it slowly filled up. 

We were still living in the old house though. So, we had one last football Sunday. We decided ordering pizza would be the easiest, so we just went with that. Meanwhile, the dogs were less than pleased with all the stuff disappearing. 

I spent Sunday and Monday working on one of the non-painted walls in the Harry Potter room. It's hard to tell in this picture, and apparently, I never took a picture of it on my camera, but Asa took on his phone. Basically, we wall-papered the wall with pages from Harry Potter. This is the first page from every single chapter, plus some other key pages (like the first time Harry uses 'Expecto Patronum!', and 'Here Lies Dobby'), and there's also the front page from every book. The top corner page is also the very last page of the last Harry Potter book. Making it even cooler, the pages come from my dad's Harry Potter books. We have our own copies, but his were paperback, and had been read so much they were falling apart. It was a way to keep them without keeping them. And, I'm telling you this looks SO.COOL. in person. I still had one wall to do in their room, but no furniture (for now) was going against it, so it was fine to move in. 

Tuesday was our moving truck day. Since we've moved to Florida, we've always just moved the five of us on our own. It's gotten easier in that the boys are bigger and presumably, more helpful. But, also we've got a lot more stuff. We really decided Tuesday would be the best day for moving, so we could be in the new house by Thanksgiving. But, getting everything out in one day sounded like a little too much. We decided to rent two trucks, about a week apart. The first one would take enough of our stuff to live comfortably in the new house for a week, the second would get all the non-essential items 

The pets all came with us the first go around, too obviously. Deleno came with me, and was most troublesome in the front seat. I realized I should have put him in his bath dish, or something to contain him when I was on my way. Every stop light I had to put him back out in the open so he didn't climb under the seats. 

Asa and Peyton took the cats over, which I heard was equally as terrible as Deleno. In another trip later, I took the dogs, while Asa took the truck. Porkchop and Phenom were difficult. But, Ellie seemed fine with it. 

Between moving and vacationing, we'd been eating out quite a bit, at least by our standards, and everyone was kind of sick of it. So for our first night in the new house I put some pork in the slow cooker, bought some prepackaged mashed potatoes, and heated up a bag of frozen veggies. And Hayden even did the dishes, now that we have a working dishwasher. 

Most everything got put in it's place in the new house without a hitch, except for Peyton's top bunk. The angle going into his room was different, so the rails were preventing us from getting it in. We also lacked the correct size allen wrench to take it apart. 

 

So for the first night, Peyton and Hayden slept in the front room with their mattresses out there. The next day we went to get the wrench to take it apart (the first of many, many trips to Lowes- thank goodness they built that one right near us!) But nobody seemed to mind the mattress and blanket mountain that was our front room for the first night (especially Ellie- she was pretty nervous about what was going on). 

The first night we just did some more curtain hanging, and light bulb replacement. Nothing too major. 

The pets have been adjusting ok. Dipper still hides, but he does love the screened in porch. He can finally feel like he's outside. Ellie has had a hard time with the adjustment, and requires some extra attention. Phenom and Porkchop haven't seemed to notice, except that their neighbor dog has been replaced, and the new one insists on playing with them.

With no internet or cable, the boys parked themselves in my room with the Xbox for a lot of Minecraft playing. Meanwhile, Asa and I did our best to unpack some things on Wednesday to make it not seem completely empty for Thanksgiving. Homeschool Central was first on my list, because it was a ton of stuff. 

Thursday was Thanksgiving, obviously. I tried my best to make it feel like a normal holiday, even with the house all in boxes. We had our typical Thanksgiving breakfast of donuts. 

And some appetizers for lunch. 

We had a mishap with the Frontier people, though. They were supposed to come Wednesday to hook up our TV and internet. Frontier has been terrible for us, so I was a little worried about them coming the day before Asa had volunteered to work overtime from home (he almost always volunteers to work the holidays for the OT). Of course Frontier screwed up, and told us they wouldn't be out until December 1st. After all day on the phone with them, we called Brighthouse instead, and they got us in for Friday. But, that meant we had to use Asa's cell phone as a hot spot for work, and we didn't really get Thanksgiving football. It was kind of a bummer, but what can you do? 

Thursday was also the first meal Asa cooked in the new house. It's not what I had in mind when we put the offer in on the house in July, but I guess it makes for a good story. 

And it was Ellie's first Thanksgiving with us. She got to have some people food, even though we've tried to cut down on her people food consumption, what with her weight gain and all. 

I made sure to have our Thanksgiving table cloth that we write/draw on every year handy, so we could at least carry on with that tradition. The new house got lots of mentions this year. 

Last year we missed Pie Making Wednesday because we had Thanksgiving at Disney. This year we missed it because we were moving. But, there was still pie. Overall, it was a decent Thanksgiving, given the circumstances. 

We spent the rest of the holiday weekend unpacking. Some things I hadn't seen for months. All of my kitchen magnets, Cogsworth and Lumiere, and my kitchen decorative stuff had been boxed for months, so it was nice to finally see them again!

I continued my work on the Harry Potter room, too. Against the last mostly unpainted wall, we made the beginings of what will be Platform 9 3/4. The peel and stick brick wall paper turned out better than I had imagined. We didn't want to go to the ceiling with it, so we went up to the doorway, and then bought some wood at Lowe's to finish it off. I think it looks awesome. Again, it photographs well, but not nearly as cool as it looks in person. 

Oh, and it's all topped off with one of the coolest light switch covers. The plant shelf above the closet also makes a great display area for all the boys Harry Potter memorabilia. Some of it we made during Harry Potter week, some of it we've picked up at Universal. It's a work in progress, but for now, this is what we have. 

Asa meanwhile, worked on things like changing out the locks. The front room was still pretty empty, with a lone mattress that belonged on the boys trundle and a few book/toy shelves. 

Sunday was our first football day in the new house, so we had our very first Blue Spring Drive taco bar

The next day, on Monday, we rented our second truck. Calib and Hayden stayed behind, while Peyton came with us. We had to get the remaining non-essential items like the garage pantries, the chest freezer, one of the couches, the big potted trees out back, the basketball hoop, the trundle bed. It seemed like there wasn't a lot left, but it still took us a few hours to get to all of it. We also said goodbye to all of our awesome neighbors. Lonnie and Jan next door were awesome to live next to for five years. We'll miss their random door knocks to bring us baked goods or tell us about some cool event we can't miss. Jen and Cliff behind us were pretty great too, we'll miss them as well. 

And that's a wrap for Butterfly Landing Drive! 

While we never made it to the store on Black Friday, we did do a little online shopping. Asa's OT more than paid for the awesome Amazon lightning deal on a new TV. 

Hayden's best friend from our old neighborhood was turning 15 on Thursday. So on Wednesday we invited Maddie over to see the new house and to celebrate her birthday. We had some cake, and took her out to dinner to celebrate. 

Last week was all about unpacking. We had waited so long to move, I felt like my life had been in boxes for years. I was anxious to unpack, and some of it was easier than other's. A lot of it was a sequential nightmare though. And we had some serious difficulty getting up shelves. It was nothing a good drill and a stud finder couldn't fix though. The wire shelves were the worst, but we did eventually get them up- and I had somewhere to put my clothes, and we FINALLY have all of our games in one place. The game closet in the office is really the best thing ever. 

After the pain-in-the-butt-wire shelves, the little ledge shelves were easy. We put some up in the kitchen for the cookbooks, and one above homeschool central. 

But, with all this new wall space, we needed some new shelves too. I made a trip to Ikea to pick up some things for the new house. It only took 8 shelves for all the Disney infinity guys, but they look pretty cool on the wall in the Office. In fact, the office is all put together now. 

But more exciting than that, we put together a whole Hall of Presidents. It's AMAZING, you guys. All my presidential stuff is in one place. On the kitchen side wall, we have all of our letters from the presidents, and then on the opposite wall, we have everything from my Pez Dispensers, to my Benjamin Harrison plate, to our Easter Egg Roll tickets. And it's all under my dad's flag, which is cool. 

By then I was only down to three boxes, and they were all Calib's stuff, so we put up his shelves and his hats. He isn't into curtains, and he has his blinds anyway, so I took the curtain rod and used it to put up all his awards. There was still stuff here everywhere, but at least I was out of boxes! 

Two days ago, Hayden helped me hang all the frames. 

I've been working on some other projects too, but I'll just wait and show off the finished product once we get there. (Spoiler Alert: Most of it is for the Harry Potter Room). In the meantime, Asa has been enjoying cooking in his new kitchen. 

Football Sunday yesterday was kind of amazing. Football looked awesome on the new TV, we had plenty of room for our chili & baked potato bar, and the Bucs won! Later, we found out that in two weeks the Bucs have gotten flexed into Sunday night- something that hasn't happened since 2008. I was super excited, until I realized that's the night Calib flies back from Ohio, and I'll have to miss it to go pick him up. 

Between all the moving, and the projects, and the holidays, school work is pretty non-existant, and the boys are pretty bored. Asa took everyone down to the lodge a couple of times (I still have not been), and Hayden has decided it's time for a Presidential Stuffed Animal Election. Apparently Buffalo Bill is trying to take down Benny the Beaver, the current stuffed animal president. 

And now we've arrived at Christmas. The house is barely decorated, but I did get a few items out. I don't have our usual Christmas activities punch board yet, I haven't even thought about cookie baking, and trying to figure out a good Disney Christmas Day is proving to be very difficult. (I haven't been to an amusement park in nearly a month, it's not awesome). 

Anyway, we'll keep working away, and try and squeeze in our Christmas Activities even if they are a bit abbreviated. But, at least I've finished my new house blog- so one more thing off the to-do list! I leave you with a cute picture of how I found Maybel and Hayden this morning. 

Next Up: Christmas, I hope. We'll get there!