Children are Gifts from God: Our New House

These are some of our cute kids on our front porch of our new home. We moved here the middle of January and we love our house and the city.

The house looks small from the front, but it has been added on to and is about 3800 square feet with six bedrooms and two baths. Perfect for our large family.

The street is lined with these great shade trees. They are beautiful especially now that they are in full bloom. Main Street also has these trees on both sides for several blocks.

Here's the side view; you can see the addition.

Here's the other side and the carport. There is storage above the carport that we havn't even began to use because there is so much storage in the house.

The livingroom is the first room when you enter through the front door. It is long and skinny. It has a large doorway that leads into the kitchen.

The livingroom has this nice built-in bookshelf.

This bedroom is off to the side when you come in the front door. At first, Shautel was using it for a room, but we moved her upstairs with the other children and we are using this room as an office.

We are just loving the large kitchen. It has a beautiful floor that doesn't show all the dirt like our last kitchen floor did. It doesn't have a dishwasher, but we have found that we keep up with the dishes better without one because we make sure all the dishes are done instead of thinking, "oh, we'll get the rest of these in the next load"...which never happened because the next time you went to do dishes, there was the ones that you left plus enough for another load.

It has a nice big pantry in the back of the kitchen. It is a cleaning closet/pantry/coat closet.

Across from the pantry is the upstairs laundry. It has been so nice having it right in the kitchen. In our last house, the laundry was downstairs and we where always behind on laundry because it was downstairs where we didn't see it all the time. Now, it is right in the main hub and we are always throwing in a batch. The sink in the picture is what we call the "kid sink". This is where they wash their hands so they aren't using my sink.

This is the other side of the pantry, it has a built-in china cabnit, which I hope to have china to put in it someday, and a computer desk.

The master bedroom is huge! We have always just had room for a bed and a dresser until now.

This is the other side of the master bedroom.

This is the master bedroom closet.

There is a main bathroom right off the masterbedroom and at the bottom of the stairs that leads to the children's rooms.

These are the stairs that lead to the children's rooms. When we first saw them, we knew the children would naturally want to slide down the built-in slide on the side there. Steve sat all the children down and discussed how that was not going to be allowed. As of today, I would guess they have only slide down it about 200 times. Steve threatens to make them pay to replace the carpet, and someday I think they will have to.

At the top of the stairs is this little area with a closet.

The are no doors on any of the four bedrooms up here, but this one has a curtain. It is like a loft, yet there are four separate rooms. This one has a window-seat with storage under it.

Here's another bedroom. You can see that the upstairs has an A-frame shape to it.

The two bedrooms on the other side are really one bedroom with a partial wall in between. Both sides have these great cubbie-holes.

This picture shows the built-in bookshelf where we keep all the children's books.

Here's the other cubbie-hole. Plenty of hiding places for hide-and-seek. This really is the perfect loft for children to grow up in.

Here's the bedroom accross from the cubbie-hole.

Now we are have left the upstairs and are heading to the basement.

This is the familyroom.

Off the family room is an extra sink. There used to be a kitchen down here. I use this for grinding my wheat and making bread in my bread machines.

This is the downstairs laundryroom. My dream-come-true; two laundry rooms! No, the jeans in the picture are not our laundry, these where jeans I was selling on ebay.

This is the second bathroom. Yes, it needs some work, but the toilet, sink, and shower work. In our last house we only had one bathroom, so this extra bathroom is heaven!

This is the food storage room. Look at all those shelves!

And more shelves. We are using them for stuff instead of food right now. Maybe one day we will have them full of food storage!

Underneath all these clothes is our back patio. This was my ebay business; shortly after we moved, I decided to partner with my mother-in-law and sister-in-laws and move my business to my sister-in-laws place.

There's the clothesline which I use everyday now.

Here's the cute little workshop. It is actually not little. It has a basement, an upstairs, and a main floor. It is 900 square feet. Orginally, I was going to use it for my ebay business, now we use it for storage, yard tools, etc...