the house

We're back in Mass now, here for the Easter weekend. It took about five hours to drive here last night...and Kyalo slept the entire way, bless him.  While we're home, I'm going to take advantage of fast and unlimited internet, and multiple parties to watch Kyalo to hammer out a bunch of blog posts.

I figure the best is to start from the beginning, so without further ado, the house!

 There she is!

But, before you get too excited, this is actually a four-family home. We have one of the apartments on the bottom floor, which means we get those great bay windows.  This was the first place of the day that we looked at when we were house hunting, and since it was the first of several appointments, we wanted to keep an open mind...there were things we didn't love about it (a small kitchen, little closet space, etc), and thought we might find something better.

No.

It was leaps and bounds better than everything else we saw. This is a first floor apartment (though there are a few stairs to get into that), has hard wood floors throughout, a large living room/dining room space, and good light. Most of the others we looked at were second floor walk ups - up steep, narrow stairs, and I was envisioning trying to lug Kyalo (and groceries, other things) up and down those on a regular basis. Not fun.  The last one we looked at - which we looked at as we were waiting for our landlord to come from NYC - was awful.  In an industrial, run down neighborhood, a third-floor walk up (but it felt like six) and was so steeped in smoke that I felt like we'd get cancer just from living there.

Suddenly, the first apartment looked much, much better.

We feel so blessed to be in this apartment, with its good space, accessibility to school for Dexter, the walkability of the neighborhood, and a pretty great landlord. 

 our little sickie, checking out the apartment

 kitchen

* some day, I'm going to have a kitchen with all the counter space and storage that I want. And the outlets will all be perfectly placed, too.  Until then, I'm grateful for this.

This hutch thing is in the hallway and provides a lot of necessary storage.  I wish it could be a bit decorative, but right now it is serving as a bit of an office as our printer and computers end up there.

{a little dark} the bay windows!

 our $250.00 Craigslist couch (and white coffee table) which is, so far, the only money we've spent on furniture!

 moving in mess

 G-ma came to help!

off to church

The other great thing about where we live is that we can see the New York City skyline.  Not a bad place to set up camp for two years!