7 Things I’m Most Excited About in Our New House

Our house remodel is nearing the finish line and with any luck we’ll be able to move in within a few weeks!

It’s been nearly six months since we made an offer on this house and I am so excited to finally get to live there.

Since I shared that we were moving, I’ve had so many people send messages saying, “Why are you moving? I thought you loved your house!”

(In fact, the mortgage company asked us to write a letter explaining why we were moving since our new house is only marginally bigger than our old house and a very similar cost in the same town – they couldn’t understand why we were moving either!)

And we did LOVE that house.

But the new house also had some things we just wouldn’t ever be able to make happen in our old house and I’m REALLY looking forward to them!

Here are a few of the things I’m most excited about in the new house.

7 Things I’m Most Excited About in Our New House

1. A kitchen island. This was the number one thing I didn’t like about our old house. The girls always wanted to be in the kitchen with me while I was making dinner or I wanted to chat with Bart while he did dishes and there was just nowhere to sit in our old kitchen. Because our kitchen both didn’t have an island AND wasn’t an eat-in kitchen (the table and chairs were in the dining room and you couldn’t see them from the kitchen), there was simply nowhere for people to be. And as our girls were getting older, I really wanted them to be able to be around, instead of in a separate room. EVERYONE (from grandparents to my 38 week pregnant sister!) would sit on the goofball little IKEA stool in the kitchen because that’s where people want to be. Having a kitchen with an island AND the kitchen table feels like the biggest upgrade to me and I cannot wait. It’s not a giant island (probably half the size of our Arizona one), but I’ll take it!
2. An ensuite bathroom. Since 2010, we’d lived in houses with an ensuite bathroom for the two of us and frankly, it turned out to be less of a big deal than I expected to move into a house without one. But now that we’re THIS close to being back in a house WITH one? I cannot wait. Also, separate sinks forever.
3. A third bathroom. Speaking of bathrooms, the new house has three bathrooms instead of two and I’m just so excited that not everyone will be using our bathroom 100 times a day. The downstairs bathroom in our last house was as far from the upstairs as it was possible to be and so no one every wanted to go use it.
4. A walk-in closet. Our bathroom had a little room off it that was PERFECT for converting into a walk in-closet. We removed the sliding glass doors that went out to the backyard and closed up the wall and had a local closet company put in a full closet system and I cannot wait to unpack. To be honest, it’s not really even about having a closet that we can walk into – Bart and I shared a standard closet for the past 2.5 years and it was fine. It’s the sliding door situation that made me crazy. Almost daily we’d be getting ready for bed or for the day at the same time and we’d have to slide those dumb doors back and forth a million times. Which was made worse by the fact that they were right next to Tally’s room and just LOUD.
5. The Art Closet. Bart wanted to make the new house as fun as possible and while I shut down most of his ideas for fun (because I didn’t want to spend the money), one thing we DID agree on was turning the under-the-stair closet into a little art room for the girls. Earlier this month, when we did our monthly meetings with the girls, we asked each of them what they were most excited about in the new house and they all said the art room!
6. The patio under the deck. One of the big selling points of this new house was the enormous back deck. And obviously, I’m really excited about that. But maybe even MORE exciting to me is the patio UNDER that deck – we’re putting our ping pong table down there and I think it’ll just be a really fun, shaded space for all of us!
7. A quieter street. Our last house was on a pretty busy street (when my brother was teaching my girls to longboard a few summers ago, he kept saying “WHERE are all these cars coming from? They just keep coming!!”) and our new street is WAY more quiet. I am really really looking forward to that change.

It’s going to be such a fun new space for our family and I cannot wait. I’m even excited about unpacking!

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