How Things Are Shaping Up

Inside

If you've got a minute or two, I'll give you the mini tour...

Here we have Dominic, doing one of many things he does best.  First, he put the white board up for us yesterday, then he decorated it with one of our favorite faces...

 (There's Theresa there, too... Another favorite face.  ;)

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Behind Dominic working at the white board, you can see the wonderful kitchen island.  A lot of the day happens right here. The rest of the kitchen is all set up, fully functioning, and somewhat small, maybe, but convenient and very homey.  You can see Theresa at the computer behind onion-chopping Cathy there; the printer is finally hooked up so my piano maven can print out some music, but there's no internet on that computer yet.  Not a biggie, since I have it on my laptop (Deo Gratias for small favors!), so the kitchen computer is working chiefly for school work.  Among other things, the children's daily math gets done right here.

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Don't you love this now? The lovely bowed window over the kitchen sink? It's awesome. We can't get enough of  the views out our kitchen windows!  You can just see the structure of the old windmill through this one. See it?  The working hand pump is just beneath it there on the other side of the car.

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And here, to the right of the window and just the other side of the stove, we have the pantry.  It's definitely smaller than some we've had, but it's very convenient, and we're making it do nicely. 

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Right around the corner from the kitchen now... We've set up a little school corner in the dining room.  This room is the center of the house; the big ole table is in here and the correspondingly big ole wood stove, and not much else.  There's a little tiny bit of space of bookshelves, but that's it.  We're still working on this area.  See that weird yellow stripe behind the pinecone wreath?  We don't know what that's all about.  At some point, we plan to paint this room a warm subtle yellow -- with no stripes.

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Look this way now, just across the room from the little bookcase on the other side of the laundry room door...  I need some small shelving here, I think, to store more of our daily school supplies.  This is where we'll do our "together stuff," when we're not crowded around the island in the kitchen doing it.  (Seems like that's where it wants to get done lately...)  Still working on this corner, too.

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Kitty-corner from the globe and skeleton...  Can't have autumn without these guys.  They're tucked in the far corner of the dining room, between the boys' bedroom door and the doorway to the 'master suite,' which contains our room and a small full bath. There are six doorways off of this central space and these are just two of them!  The kitchen and living room enter into this room, as well as the laundry room, June's bedroom, and these two doorways.  This dining room is Grand Central Station!

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Here's the one good-sized bookcase we've been able to fit in this house.  It stands on the dining room wall next to the entryway to the living room. You can see only a small sampling of our books have made it in so far.  We still have some bookbins to go through (to say the least); since our shelf space is so limited here, we have to be really picky!  Pictures and pumpkins are holding the books' places until we decide what we want to bring in from storage. (Oh, and there you have William in his raggedy old pirate pants.)

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Here's the wood stove.  We're hopeful that it'll provide the majority of our heat this winter.  We're in the market now for a new chainsaw to add to the wood in the woodshed to make that possible.

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And the dining room table, of course.  (Weird how all the electrical outlets in this house are waist-high, isn't it?  We're not sure why this is...)

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And the last corner of the dining room to share... This is opposite the school shelves, between June's door and the entryway to the living room, where we'll keep the little statue of Our Blessed Mother.   We're still working on how we want this to look; she needs a new pedestal, for one thing, and that electrical outlet is sure an eyesore. (We've got to figure out a way to hide that...) The bigger statue, unfortunately, just won't fit in this small house, but we'll make a place for it most likely in the summer kitchen.

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Now we come to the living room.  When we first saw the two bright yellow (happy face) walls, we blanched, deciding immediately that they would have to be painted. But adding furniture has seemed to tone the color down a bit, and it's actually rather grown on us.  We may repaint it a slightly lighter yellow later, but for now, it actually kinda makes us happy.  It goes really well with the fall decor!  Check out Moon Man there, holding his candles in the window.  And the chess set is up and ready to be used!

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Here are the Chenoweth Crows (not a Halloween decoration so much as that they're on my family crest, doncha know). They're checking out the view in the window over the new couch.

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The venerable old green cabinet works nicely in this house.  All our school books are behind these doors, as well as our DVD collection.  The cabinet over there on the other side conceals our VHS tapes.  Dan just bought us a new VCR so we can watch them all again!

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On top of the VCR cabinet, we've set up our little autumn village.  We're still working on it, though, and plan to add a branch with handmade autumn leaves and a big smiley moon to the picture before we're finished with the whole scene...

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And on the other long wall is our piano -- sometimes known as "Jeremy's Piano," since he was the seminarian we thank for helping us get it.  We found it for $50 on Craigslist, and thinking it was too good a deal to be true, it was only with his certified piano tuner's OK that we felt comfortable even going to look at it.  At the end of the big moving day, we took Jeremy and the empty moving truck with us to go check it out, and providentially, this little piano turned out to be perfect in every way!  It's just the right size and by all accounts plays especially well.  Our statue of Mater Dei rests, at least for the time being, on top of the piano, with Frater Philip's painting of Bag End hanging above it on a convenient nail.  We're planning to work on this whole wall, though, over time.  I think we'll put a shelf over the piano for our statue, which will make space to put a piano light on the piano -- and I expect there will be some switching out of art before we decide how to arrange the rest of the wall.  Time will tell how it all ends up.

Next:  How Things Are Shaping Up: Outside