My Newest Dollhouse

 Although I've been trying to curb my "collecting" lately, since we're somewhat in between homes for the moment, I did get a "new" dollhouse for Christmas from my wonderful husband!  He obediently followed the link I sent him in my Christmas list, and "surprised" me with my favorite gift!  Those are the best kinds of gifts, aren't they?  The ones you pick out yourself?  Ha!

 

 

Anyway though, I am completely enamored with this little homemade house!  I'll give you a tour.  As you can see, the outside isn't much to look at, although I think the size of the door is quite charming! 

 

 A little big for the scale of the house, but what the heck?  It works!

 

 The inside is just adorable!  Yummy pastel shades and hand-applied artwork!

 

 Each room has its own rugs and décor, and I just can't get over how cute that is!

 

 I love to think about a mother (or perhaps the daughter?) cutting out the pictures from catalogs for each room.

 

 The bathroom has lots of towels in it!

 

The roof shingles are in the same scale as the door (large!), but again, I think that adds to the charm!

 

 All my doll furniture is packed up now, so I'm not sure how it will be decorated, but frankly, I'm perfectly happy with the way it looks right now anyway!

 

It is such a happy little house, and I simply love it!

 

 

No More Red Walls!

We are slowly, but surely, making some changes to our new house before we move in.  My first priority was painting the dark red walls in our great room.

 

 This is a photo from before we took possession, when the old owners still lived there.  It was decorated beautifully, but the red walls just don't work with my style in the least!  Painting them was a pretty big issue though, since these are 20" ceilings! 

 

After getting back quotes from a painter, we quickly decided that we wouldn't be able to take that route, which meant it was up to my husband, who is afraid of heights!  And since he is very particular about painting, he doesn't allow me to do it at all.  Usually that suits me fine, but I felt bad that he'd have to do something he wasn't comfortable with.

 

But, he faced his fears, and he did it!  I had to sit at the base of the ladder while he worked, just in case, but that was perfectly fine with me!  He even let the kids climb the ladder just for fun!

 

 Don't think my heart wasn't racing while they were up there!!

 

And now we have non-red walls!  I opted for a neutral cream for now.  I want to see how the room comes together before committing to anything else. 

 

As you see here, I got a vintage pull-down map to hang.  I plan to put it over the television, and it can be raised and lowered as needed.  I'm not crazy about having a TV over the fireplace (that's prime display space!!!), but this thing is mounted in there pretty tight, and would take quite a bit of work to remove it, so for now, I'm going to try out the map.

 

The shelves are currently just a drop-zone for things as I unpack them, so I'm not sure what will be going in those.  And I have NO IDEA what to put in those huge archways up there!  As you can see from the previous photos with the kids, they are like 4-5' tall!  At first I had thought dollhouses (because, like, duh!), but I don't think I have any that wouldn't be completely dwarfed!  We'll see, I guess.

 

 

I also need to get a rug.  We haven't had hardwood floors before, so I don't have much experience buying rugs, but I'm leaning right now towards this one.  I think it would work well with the map colors and the floor.

 

So anyway, that's where things stand right now.  Our old house hasn't sold yet.  We bought a St. Josef's statue, and buried it a few days ago, so we'll see if he does the trick for us!

 

I'll keep you all posted as things progress further!

 

December

Happy New Year to all of you who are sticking with me through my blogging semi-hiatus!  I hope you all had a great holiday season and a great start to the new year!

 

December was an extra busy month for us, since in addition to the holidays, we also gained possession to our new house!  So I just thought I'd give you all a rundown on some of the fun things we did to make the month special!

 

 Here we are in front of the new house, the evening we took possession.  The old owner actually took this photo, because they were finishing clearing out, late into the evening!

 

 The next day, the kids and I went over after school and got acquainted with one of our new neighbors!  We're right next to a large field where Friar (the horse) comes out to play.  We've already stocked up on carrots to feed him!

 

 And Noah got acquainted with our new basketball net!  This house has a detached four-car garage on the property (in addition to the two-car garage attached to the house).  Can I tell you what kind of Heaven my husband is in???  The room to the side of the garage will actually be my husband's office.  He works from home, so now he'll work from the garage!

 

 Since I didn't decorate our old house for Christmas, I took out the kid's Christmas toys and let them play with them over at the new house.

 

 We also set up the Christmas tree and let the kids decorate while their cousins came over to check out the house!

 

I didn't go all out with the tree, but just let the kids put their own ornaments on.

 

 It was nice to have some Christmas out at last!!

 

 Avery and I took a special trip to go see the Nutcracker!

 

We also went to see some fabulous lights in a nearby neighborhood- the whole neighborhood looks like this- it's magical!

 

Then came Christmas!  We're still living at our old house until it sells, but we packed up all the presents and took them to the new house to open our presents.  We set up the camping chairs and some rugs, and we were ready!

 

 The kids got very few toys this year.  There's really not much they want, and we wanted to keep it light for obvious reasons.  But they did get lots of things to use at the new house (the yard is HUGE compared to our current house), like baseball gloves...

 

 ...baseball bats...

 

 ...and pillows for their rooms!

 

 And Mommy got a couple nice things, too!  Like this new dollhouse!  I'll have to show you more in detail later, but it is A-DOR-ABLE!  Completely homemade and quirky and wonderful!

 

 And also this homemade doll stove!

 

I love that this new house has an open staircase where I can get birds-eye-view shots down into the family room! 

 

 But the kids' most exciting gifts were a new tire swing and a disc swing!  My husband and father put them up in the backyard on Christmas Eve, and they were a wonderful surprise for the kids!

 

 

 

 

 You can't see it in the photos, but the tire swing has their names printed on the top.  They each sit on their own name every time!   As you can see, they had a great time!!

 

 Noah and my father also tried out the new basketballs they got!

 

 Then, a few days later, the kids and I took a trip to a wonderful beach with their cousins.

 

 We call it the rock beach, for obvious reasons!

 

 They had a great time getting dirty...

 

...and climbing into the holes in the rocks...

 

 ...and playing in the freezing cold water!

 

 It's a gorgeous beach, so I took a few pretty photos.

 

 Isn't that beautiful?

 

So, that was December for us!  We are slowly moving things over to the new house-it's nice to have an overlap so that we can move at our own pace.  But we're crossing our fingers that the old house will sell soon!  We're working on painting our family room (the red walls in the Christmas photos), and then I can start beginning to think about decorating!  I'll keep you all updated!

 

Happy New Year!!!