Pictures of our new house

Warning! Our house is in shambles and we have no furniture so these pictures will definitely be the before pictures and I will take more when we get settled in and we get our stuff back sometime in September.

One of my favorite rooms in this house is the kitchen. I love the windows that look into the backyard. The oven and stove (or hob as they call it) was a little difficult to figure out and the oven is in Celsius so that will be fun to learn J The fridge, freezer and dishwasher all look like the cabinets which I really like too. We do have the tiniest fridge and freezer though. They hold nothing….I guess on the upside though we will never forget leftovers in the back of the fridge and things won’t go bad! The oven is also a double oven but the two parts of the oven are very tiny and it should really just be one big oven. Definitely not fitting a turkey in that think for thanksgiving, I guess Matt will have to deep fry one.

Most kitchens in Europe have the washer and dryer in the kitchen. Thank goodness ours does not! I am so excited we have an actual laundry room!! (still waiting for a washer and dryer haha)

I LOVE our backyard. It is enclosed on every end so no one can really see in and it is actually pretty big in size. I can’t wait to get our fire pit out there and enjoy some of the colder weather around the fire.  There is also a close line that came with the house. I had no idea what it was in the yard and Matt got a laugh out of that one! Not many outside clothes line in northern Virginia J The other side of the backyard I would love to get a standing hammock to enjoy in the summer (so crossing my fingers we can find a cheap one!) The little coves in the brick wall I want to try and put flowerpots in for next summer.

We have three bathrooms and one is a half bath on the first floor next to the kitchen. (Side note: there were no mirrors that came with this house! Matt and I are sharing a little 4inch mirror right now that we bough) Need to find some mirrors to hang up!

Here is a picture of our hallway. I love the little part under the stairs and I also love our front door and the flowers on the glass.

We have three bedrooms in the house and one is downstairs on the same floor as the living room and kitchen. For now we will make this room the study.

We have a pretty big living room so it will fit our sectional couch! Wahoo! (I have heard of people having to selling their couches when they get here and can’t fit them in their house or even get them through the door way.) Luckily we have two huge doors that lead out to our backyard from the living room that the movers can use to get our couch in. 

The other two bedrooms and bathroom are upstairs. Currently one if being used as a storage unit for all of Matt’s stuff. Both the bedrooms are the same size but one has a bigger closet.

This bedroom will be the guest bedroom for when you all come visit J (so Kate this will be your room! Haha) The closet is smaller because of the hot water tank and this closet will be Matt’s closet.  A lot of houses here don’t have any closets so we are pretty lucky we have two.

The bathrooms here are very different. The shower in the guest room has this screen you pull across the shower (no shower curtain) but it only can fit part way so water can get out and the slant of the wall doesn’t give you much room to shower. There are also no outlets in any of the bathrooms! I was completely shocked and kind of confused haha. I guess I will be blow-drying my hair in the bedroom.

The last room is our bedroom (we have a nice fancy blow up mattress to sleep on) We are getting a lot of great sleep on that baby, NOT! I love how big the closet is in this room and sadly I will need to whole thing for all my stuff (I need to simplify my life ASAP) One thing about living in here I have realized we have way too much stuff as Americans. These houses have no storage places or closets (we have no linen closet) and I realized if they could get by without all that junk why do we need it? Luckily we have a garage that will become our storage unit instead of putting a car in. There are a lot of things we brought (since we thought we were going to Alaska) that I know won’t work over here like our treadmill and sadly our kegerator (CRYING!!)

Lastly our bathroom has just a shower and what I love about the bathrooms are the skylights that open up  but it also makes it inconvenient to put a mirror anywhere. I will let you know when I figure that one out.

Both bathrooms upstairs have these towel warming racks, haven’t tried it yet but excited for the winter time to get out of the shower and have a freshly warmed towel waiting for me! Haha

Side note: One thing we learned quickly after not having water for our first day was that you have to program the heat and water to come on during certain times of the day. You schedule times for it to go on and off when you know you will be taking a shower or need the heat turned on. Its all part of that efficiency thing over here J And all the outlets have switches on them so you have to turn them on and off when you use them. They really should have a learner’s book for Americans when moving into these houses! There you have it our new home! Can’t wait for all our friends and family to come visit J I promise I will have the house more put together by then and we will have actually couches and beds for everyone!