The move to Virginia, part 1

 

 

Ross and I drove out to Virginia by ourselves in early April to find a place to live. It was a little tricky figuring out all the logistics of how we were going to do this, but luckily both sets of grandparents were ready to help. While Ross finished his last week of work at Marquette, I took the kids to Sauk Rapids, Minnesota, where we were meeting Grandma Bonnie and Papa Jeff at Uncle Jesse and Aunt Sarah's house. Grandma and Papa drove the John and Lila back to North Dakota with them for a week-long visit. Meanwhile, Halley, our poodle, was enjoying some quality-time with Grandma Robin and Papa Harry, who also live in Minnesota.

 

So, back to the house hunt....Ross and I weren't sure what to expect from the rental search in Virginia. We'd done a lot of looking online at homes and townhomes in Alexandria and Springfield, and we thought we'd found the perfect house to rent in Springfield. We were so nervous that the house would be rented out from under us!

 

It was still available when we arrived in Virginia, but we ended up falling in love with a much newer (and newly renovated) 3-story townhouse right down the road from the house instead. The townhouse met all of our needs/wants and more.....3 bedrooms, a large kitchen (especially compared to the small one in Wisconsin), an area for the kids to use as their playroom, and a garage (we have a 2-car garage.....a luxury in this area). And, if you can believe it, we now have 2 full bathrooms and 2 half bathrooms (compared to 1 full bathroom and 1 half bathroom in Wisconsin). We are swimming in bathrooms here.

 

Some added perks are the deck right off the kitchen, the huge grassy common area a few doors down where the kids can play, and a playground adjacent to the common area. It's amazing to think that this townhouse has the same square footage as our Wisconsin house (2,000) because we were so sure we'd have to downsize in Virginia to be able to stay within our housing allowance.

 

The floorplan is unlike anything we'd seen before, but we love that it's so different. The first floor just has a small entryway and a finished basement-like area with a half bath. But you have to go up a half-flight of stairs and then down another half-flight of stairs to get to the basement from the front door. Interesting, right? The second floor is very open. There's a living room and dining room area at the front of the townhouse, a half-bath and laundry room in the middle, and the kitchen at the back. The third floor has all three bedrooms and two full baths. We are very excited to now have a master bedroom with an ensuite bath, hooray! 

 







For some reason, we still haven't taken a picture of the outside of our townhouse. And we don't have pictures of every room as they look now, but we have some 2nd-story pictures that we took the day we got the keys back in April.

 



So here's the kitchen....refinished cabinetry, brand-new tile floors, stainless-steel appliances, and granite countertops. Disregard the enormous light-bulb hanging from the ceiling....the previous owner must have had her dining table in the kitchen, but the new owner extended the countertop in order to have counter stools instead. We bought counter stools after we moved in, and we now eat breakfast and lunch at the counter every day! 

 

 

Here's the room adjacent to the kitchen, which we decided to use as an office/sitting area (with one of our televisions, too). We ended up buying some new furniture to fit the space. 

 

 

The dining room/living room combo. We decided to put our kitchen table underneath the chandelier (for obvious reasons), and this is where we eat dinner every night. We would put my mom's large hutch next to this table. The other half of the room would become our living room, with my mom's sectional against the wall at the back.

 

Another view of the dining/living space.

 

Yet another view of the dining/living space. 

 

 

 

My job this week is to actually photograph the rooms of our townhouse as they look now!! And get a shot of the exterior and our street.

Back to the blog, again

 

It's hard to believe it's been 9 months since I last posted on our blog, but it's true!! Time flies when you've got two kids and you're getting ready to sell your house and move across the country. Because I'm so behind, I'm just going to start with a couple photos from the day we closed on our Wisconsin house -- March 29th. That seems like a good transition because these are the last photos we have from Wisconsin.

 

John and Lila did a really good job of dealing with all the craziness of putting our house on the market, keeping things tidy for showings, and moving all our stuff out. We'd been talking about the move to Virginia for so long that I think it was no big deal when the time finally came. Here are the kids in the front yard, all ready to go.....

 

On the front stoop.....notice that Lila has no socks or coat on in this photo, despite the fact that there's snow everywhere. She was having a 2-year-old moment.

 

 

In front of the "sold" sign.....we were so, so glad that we got a full offer on the house just one week after we started showings. The house has a fantastic location and was completely move-in ready, so it almost sold itself, really.

 



 

 

Notice the house in the background of this next photo....it's the home of Mr. Cliff and Ms. Linda, the greatest neighbors ever! We all miss them a lot and are so glad we got to visit them about a month ago when we were back in Milwaukee for a wedding.

 

 

 

The fully-loaded Mercury Milan....it's hard to believe how much stuff we can pack into that car.

 



 

One last look at our house and street before leaving....it was our first home as a family of four! Despite all the many hardships we faced during the 21 months we lived there, we absolutely adored this place. We will always feel blessed to have been the stewards of such a grand old (1941) colonial. And who knows.....we may move back to Wauwatosa some day and fall in love with an even older house! 

 

Fall pics, continued

So, speaking of reading in the big playroom chair.....here are a few pics of John and Lila attempting to read together in the chair. They often have a hard time deciding who gets to hold the book, which usually leads to a screaming and/or crying little girl and a frustrated little boy. 

 

 

The kids (especially John) like to look at toy catalogs when they come in the mail. Lila is eyeing a Minnie Mouse Bow-tique item in the catalog below. This is a good picture of Lila wearing pigtails! I love pigtails on her.

 

These next two pictures of Lila are some of my all-time favorites. She looks so serious! The outfit she's wearing is one of my favorites, too. Aunt Jen made her adorable pink flower clip!

 

 

The complete outfit.....

 

 

And the last two pics for the evening -- John and Lila looking so sweet as they pose in the pajamas we got at Once Upon a Child  (Power Rangers for John and Minnie Mouse for Lila).

 

 

Fall pics, part 1 of many

The first day of school for the kids was Wednesday, September 5th! John and Lila attend the same school at our church in Elm Grove. John has preschool 3 days a week (Mondays, Wednesdays and Thursdays), and Lila goes to the toddler Mother's Day Out program once a week (Wednesdays). They were so excited! I can't believe how willing they were to pose for these pictures I took that morning..... 

 

 

I discovered this really nice park/playground in Brookfield called Wirth Park that we took the kids to in mid-September. The playground equipment there must be at least as old as I am, but the kids loved it! There's one of those metal merry-go-round things there as well as the tallest metal slide you've ever seen and those metal sand diggers -- everything was METAL. Not a very forgiving material for children. I wonder when playground manufacturers decided to start using plastic and/or wood instead!

 

 

Our playroom at its cleanest state ever....it is finally organized enough to be photographed.

Some new additions to the room are the craft table and four chairs, which I got for $100 at a garage sale in Naperville this summer. They're from Land of Nod and only a couple of years old! (The lady's kids had outgrown them). It would have cost five times that amount to buy them from the store. And notice the kids' artwork above the table.....we've been taping their masterpieces on the wall since the first day of school. I let them decide where they want each piece taped, so that's why everything is so randomly spread out, hehe.

Also, I put my Grandpa Glenn's globe (from the 1940s) and my mom's alphabet cross-stitch on top of the tall bookcase in the corner. My mom loved that globe and always had it in the office at her house. I like to look at it and think about how different the world looks today. The kids just like to spin it around -- all that geography goes right over their heads, of course. The alphabet cross-stitch was a something my mom had made for her niece in the late 1970s as a baby gift. When John and I lived at her house during Ross' deployment, she spent hours cleaning the background of the cross-stitch with bleach since it had yellowed with age. We had planned to mat and frame it to hang it in the basement play area of her house.

 

These alphabet cards were a gift to Lila from our family friend, Wrenne Jakubiak. Lila loves to talk about them while she's getting her diaper changed on the changing pad (which we moved from an actual changing table that we used to have in the room to the storage bench in order to save space).

 

Finally, here is the new reading area of the playroom. We didn't really have a reading area before because of the changing table, but when we brought this chair and ottoman home from my mom's house (thinking we'd bring it upstairs to John's room), we literally couldn't get it through the hallway into the rest of the house -- it's huge!! So we had to keep it in the playroom, but I'm really glad we did. It is the perfect place to read to the kids. We can all sit comfortably in it because of how wide it is.

 



 

 

More pics to come tomorrow night.....I am feeling ambitious about blogging!