Living room tile

We lost the carpet in the living room today:

Look what we found underneath!

More pictures later.  

Kitchen

By popular request on Facebook, here's the kitchen.

I love to cook.  I love to socialize while I cook.  My husband does dishes, often while I cook.  We need a kitchen large enough to handle a cook and a (human) dishwasher, plus somewhere for conversation partners to sit.

For a house with a surfeit of doors, the kitchen is door-free.  There's an opening from the hallway and another from the dining room.  There are two pantry-closets just outside the kitchen.  There's also the row of cabinets that separates the living room and stairs from the dining room and kitchen hall.

It's also one of the only rooms without horrible carpeting.  There's some dark laminate in great condition, probably recently installed.  I'm not fond of laminate -- I'd like to replace it with cork -- but it's in great shape so it can stay.

I'm standing in the east end of the kitchen looking out the west windows.  The dining room is behind me.  Just visible in profile on the left is the double wall oven (pretty new) and laundry machines.  

Buying flooring on the Internet.

There are about 2ksqft of carpet in the house. Most of it is 1980s high pile in tan; some is light blue. The rumpus room is beige berber.

Underneath the sellers' furniture, the carpet is unexciting. I don't like carpet in general, but we'd probably let it stay. Where the furniture wasn't, though, it is stained and gross. It smells of cat pee in a way that suggests it has been professionally cleaned and yet the pee got into the underlayment. The smell is worse when the house is empty and closed up. 

See that brown patch in the front right?  That's not a trick of the light. 

The carpet needs to go. 

Sinc we are getting rid of it anyways, we can have what I really want: hardwood. Tile would also be period, but I like wood better. 

We got stranded bamboo. Basically, they compress and glue and do magic things to bamboo so that it is stronger and less bamboo-looking. Bamboo is not period, but I love it, especially in this light natural color. Stranded bamboo is super hard and dense. It's oddly cheap, so we got solid wood not engineered or laminate. 

When you buy 2000 square feet of flooring in 91 boxes, they freight it to you. Some of it comes from Tukwila and some from Atlanta, and of course neither freight company knows when, even though there's only one local carrier that serves MHK so in theory they should be able to figure this out.  Probably Atlanta gets here tomorrow and Tukwila on Monday, so no pics yet. 

Fireplace

Check out the fireplace!

Fireplace front and center. Sun room on right, office on left.

Closets

I have a confession.  I hate walk-in closets.  They waste space.  Their existence in a house means the architect was too lazy to figure out how to do a better layout, or that a renovator has taken away otherwise livable space in the name of hoarding.

When you want a house with a large modern kitchen and 3-4 bedrooms, you resign yourself to accepting one or two walk-in closets.  I have a whole Pinterest board on how to reclaim walk-in closets: library nooks, built-in beds, hidden rooms, etc.

I am delighted to report that this house does not have any walk-in closets.  Unless you count the closet under the stairs (which I do not because the ceiling is very low and slopes to the floor).

This house has something a million times better: double-decker closets.

Brick shower?

There's a lot of brick in this house.  

Including, but not limited to, the downstairs bathroom:

Brick shower.  The third wall is also brick; the door is glass.

Dungeon

The house has a dark side.

You're in the garage, having just left your car.  To your right is the door into the house (off screen).

What's that back there? Another door?

Doors

Something I love about old houses: they have a lot of doors and windows.

This house has six external doors which need locks.

• Front door
• Rumpus room
• Garage door (car size) plus door from garage into house (human size)
• Library
• Living room
• Sun room.

And a large number of internal doors: 22, including three sets of sliding wooden doors on closets and one enormous sliding glass door on the wall of glass.

Fun facts about the keys:

1. Two of them are on the same lock: the front door and the living room door.
2. We don't have keys for three doors: library, garage, and rumpus.  There's a note from the sellers that suggests they didn't have keys to some of these either, but they did have keys to others.
3. We have 8 (!) front door keys and 1 sun room key.  
4. We have 5 random keys that don't open any door (!) I gave one of them to the pre-schooler because he loves keys. 
5. Some of the doors lock by pushing a button.  Others by turning a button.
6. Some of the buttons stay locked after you open the door.  Some of them unlock on opening.
7. Relatedly, the odds of us getting locked out of the house or forgetting to lock all of the house are high.

Living room

The upstairs living space is one of my favorite parts of the house.

View from sun room to living room.  Fireplace at right, office on left (behind low cabinets), dining room partially visible on extreme left.

New (to us) house!

We bought this beautiful house yesterday:

It is a custom-built mid-century modern raised ranch.  There is exposed brick and wood paneling everywhere.

You're looking at the upper patio on the east side of the house and a portion of the side yard (left of photo).  The front door is on the opposite side of the house, downstairs.