Brandon House Tour

When we moved into our house in Maryland my mom mentioned that she had a hard time imagining us in our new place because she'd never seen our home. I put together a little blog post - a virtual tour of sorts for my mom and anyone else who might like to see our new home and, surprisingly, that particular blog post became one of the most viewed of 2014.  Now we're in yet another new home and are mostly settled in so it's time to do another house tour.

This is the entry hallway, the first thing you see when you walk in the house. Our front door is tiny and there is no foyer at all just this hallway. The door on the left in this picture leads to the living room. The door on the right is to Emily's bedroom, although the room was billed as a study when we first looked at the house. The second doorway on the left, at the end of this hallway, leads to what we call the in-between room which is a medium-sized space that connects both the hallway and the kitchen kind of like a jack and jill bathroom set-up.  The door you can just see at the end of the hall leads to the family bathroom, which the girls all share.  If you turn right at the end of this hallway a door leads you to the other half of the house and the remaining bedrooms.

Coming through the door from the hallway you find yourself in the living room. Our big sectional sofa fits perfectly, as it has amazingly done in six houses over the last ten years. The front corner of this room is all windows so furniture placement was a bit tricky, the couch is actually floating about a foot away from the window both so we can close the curtains and so we don't entirely block the radiator.The fireplace at the end is electric and the fake flames are the cheesiest looking things ever, but it has a fan that pumps out enough warm air to heat the living room as well as the adjoining dining room pretty well. Speaking of the dining room...

You can just see in the pictures of the living room the large open doorway to the dining room, which is the largest room in the house. Using it just as a dining room would be insane unless we had a table for 20 so we use this room as a dining room, music room, and office. Even with all those zones it still feels wide open and there's plenty of room to spread out and dance, play with Legos, decorate gingerbread houses, or tie dye t-shirts - all things the kids have done in the space since we moved in three weeks ago. There are doors at the end leading to the kitchen so it's nice that these two rooms are convenient to each other but also amazing that I can close the door and forget about the mess that I made while producing the meals we're enjoying in the dining room.

The kitchen has so many cupboards and drawers I found empty ones last week and I'm still trying to figure out what to do with them. We now have an entire cupboard just for the deep fryer plus two junk drawers. The island in the middle came from the school here in town and was used as a classroom table in home economics classes. Our landlord told us she learned how to cook on one just like this!  We are lucky to have room for American-sized appliances in this kitchen so we have the largest fridge the base offers, but strangely, the standard British range even though we have space for a larger one. That means there is an empty gap of about six inches between the range and the cupboards. It looks a little strange but it's the perfect spot to store our step stool so it all works out. 

On the right-hand side of the kitchen is another big open doorway leading into what we're calling the sunroom.We're calling it that because of its big south facing french doors that have made it sunny on the few days we've had that are bright, bright sunshiny days. One thing that is kind of unique about this space is the windows. The house has been added on to multiple times and this room has two windows that look out on other areas of the house instead of outside. The window in the photo above looks into the bedroom hallway. We weren't sure how to use this space at first. Would it be the dining room? It would just fit our table and the kitchen is right there after all. Could we make this an office area and tuck the sometimes ugly electronics in this hidden corner of the house? In the end, we've decided to make it a family room and once we buy couches it might actually serve that purpose! Sitting on folding chairs to watch movies or play video games isn't too appealing so this is currently our least used room. 

On the opposite side of the kitchen, there is another door leading to our laundry/pantry/utility room. We have room in here for the largest washer and dryer the base can provide, but they are still a lot smaller than what we had in our last home. Because of this laundry must be done daily to prevent a backlog of dirty clothes that would take a trip to the laundromat to contain. There's also room in here for our food storage shelves and it's so nice to have this right off the kitchen. In the past, our food storage has always been in the basement so this is much more convenient. The closets in here (closets?! In a British house!) house our boiler which has something very important to do with our heat and hot water although I'm not quite sure what. It's kind of like a tankless water heater hanging on the wall in there. The rest of the space in the closet is perfect for tools, batteries, mops and brooms, and socks that need matches. Yes, it's been three weeks in this place and we already have lonely socks.

And here we have the in between room as seen from the kitchen. If you're keeping track, that's three large open doorways in this house with two of them leading off from the kitchen. This room was directly behind me when I took the picture of the kitchen above. Since we don't have a foyer I decided to make this space our mudroom. It's right off the entry hallway that you can see a sliver of in the picture. Jared's old lockers fit perfectly in that little nook by the doorway so we have a place for coats, plus he killed multiple drill bits getting that row of hooks hung on the wall. The large chalkboard/corkboard was there when we moved in and, if I ever get around to it, will make a great family command center. The closet in this room is perfect for storing our board games as well as most of my sewing supplies because this room is also my sewing room. No more sewing while standing at a kitchen counter!

Next we'll leave the in between room and go into the hallway and then through the door to the bedroom hallway. One thing that I didn't realize I'd love about this house is the way the bedrooms except for Emily's are completely separate from the rest of the house.  It's like they added on another wing and the only connecting point is the door between one hall and the next. It makes it very quiet in the bedrooms even in the middle of the day and it's a perfect house for napping! The picture of the hallway was taken from the far end so if you were walking into the hall from the main part of the house you'd walk by the mirror and then turn left down the rest of the hall. From the perspective of this photo, Natalie and Samantha's room is at the far end on the left hand side, Abigail's is the closest one on the left, and the master bedroom was directly behind me when I took this picture. The closets (again!) hold towels, sheets, a vacuum cleaner, and miscellaneous office supplies and they still aren't filled.  I'm so grateful for closets.

Samantha and Natalie are sharing a room even though they lobbied hard for a five bedroom house so everyone could have their own space. As a consolation prize, they were given the largest bedroom in the house. Since Madison moved out we have more beds than people so the extra bed went to these two. If we include the trundle bed, and I do, we have beds for four people in a room that two girls are sharing. Initially, they wanted the room divided in half either with furniture or a large curtain and we tried to give them what they wanted but I just couldn't make this large, open room into two little boxes.

As you can see, Abigail's room has a bit of a funky layout with that doorway (we're at four now!) essentially dividing the room in two. She has it set up well with her bed and wardrobe in the space beyond the opening and everything else on the other side. This is one room where I would set up curtains and divide the space. It would be kind of like a canopy bed which has always seemed cool. I can just imagine her tucked away in there reading a book. We'd probably have to force her to leave her bedroom and join the rest of the family from time to time.

You can't see it in this picture, but the master bedroom has closets as well. In fact, the closets in our bedroom are bigger than the one we had in Maryland. So, I guess it's nice that we have french doors leading out to the garden from our bedroom but it definitely made it difficult to figure out how to place our furniture. One entire wall is filled with closets, another has the door to our master bathroom, the third wall has a window that is strangely off-centered, and then there's this stupid door on the last wall. We arranged our furniture the only way it could possibly fit in the space and I'd better like it because we have no other options in here.

As the oldest child living at home, we gave Emily first pick of bedrooms between this one and the one Abigail has. The master bedroom and the big room for the girls who were sharing were out of the running. Emily chose this one because the other one has that strange layout but I think she regrets it a little. Emily's room is off by itself in the main part of the house right by the front door. It's almost perfectly square, has a big beautiful window, and is smaller than she initially thought. She's made it her own though and has set up a little vanity area at her dresser and hung her favorite things on the walls. As an aside, did you know that there are no electrical outlets in British bathrooms? That means if you want to use any hair appliance you've got to do it somewhere else. We've now set up an area with a mirror near an outlet in each bedroom. We use the bathrooms for bathing and the toilet, but makeup, hair, etc. takes place in the bedrooms. It's actually worked out really well because no one is fighting over the same small space in the mornings.

And there you have it, our new home in Brandon, England. We love it and feel so blessed to have found a place that works so well for all of us. We love company so please come visit us anytime!