Deck The Halls

Have I mentioned I love decorating? When it comes to Christmas, I'm no different - I love pulling out the garland and the white twinkly lights. Since we've moved around a lot in the past 8 years, I've been able to decorate lots of different homes for Christmas (even my in-laws!) and it's always a lot of fun coming up with new ideas. Even when we spent two Christmases in the same house (only once in the past 8 years!) I decorated differently both years.

So now that we are set up in a new house (hopefully for a few years), I thought I'd share my Christmas decorations. While I love the traditional Christmas colors, this year I thought I'd experiment with blue, silver, white and turquoise. 

I decorated our small table-top tree with white lights, a wide silver/white ribbon, some bell garland, white twigs, blue ribbons, pine cones, and blue, silver and turquoise ornaments. I used a turquoise scarf to cover the table and a fluffy white baby blanket as a tree skirt. 

We don't have a fireplace or traditional "mantle", but I usually clear off any shelves and decorate them with garland and lights. 

We have a nice big wood valance over our living room window and it also got a nice garland with lights, white twigs, a few ornaments and pine cones. In the middle is a star with a few ornaments hung underneath. Almost two years ago, a cousin got married and I was able to keep some of the decorations she used in her January wedding. The little blue, turquoise and white bobbles are making their second annual appearance in my Christmas decorating (Thanks Charissa!)

There's a little peek into our little house. We also have some festive poinsettias in the window and I still have to hang my wreath on the front of our house. When I finished all the decorating and turned only the Christmas lights on and invited the kids to come see the living room they gasped and said, "it's bootiful, momma!" (Still doesn't keep them from taking all the ornaments down though!) 

Wordless Wednesday - New Sofa

If you saw my Friday's Letters last week, you'll know I was extremely excited about receiving the call that my new sofa (ordered, like, for. ever. ago - ok, ok it was only 3 weeks) was to be delivered on Tuesday. Why was I so excited? Well, when we lived in our tiny apartment, we only had room for one little sofa, a very small love seat. With two small kids, it was ok, put a kid on each lap and we were set. Now the kids are getting bigger and we moved to a larger house and our love seat was looking rather small and lost in our huge (to us) living room.

A rare clean house. 

See that little couch just barely sticking out on the right? That was ALL we had for the first few months in this place. We didn't even have the big bean bag for a while. Lots of open space for the kids to run, though, which was nice. However, we knew we'd like/need something bigger for hosting people, as well as for our growing family. After slightly recovering from moving costs, I went on the hunt. 

Here's our living room now (pardon the slightly blurry photo.)

Now the couch that occupied the alcove on the right has been replaced with a lovely corner sofa, upholstered in the same material as our love seat. The love seat is now basically in the middle of the room, creating a division between the living and dining areas. And you can see the kid paraphernalia is starting to multiply there in the left corner. 

Here's a better look at our beauty.

 We are in love. It's comfy, just the right size for our space and being covered in fake leather is super easy to clean. Yes, in just one day we've already had at least one yogurt spill. 

Now, to get a few more throw pillows and get something up on our painfully naked walls.

Isn't settling in fun? Now, if only I had a decorating budget! 

Our New Digs

A while back, I posted about moving and promised photos "in a couple of days" - HA! Well, here I am finally getting around to posting some photos of our new house. I had to laugh after a friend commented that she was glad our "dream house" had worked out. Our house is not perfect, and I don't think I would describe it as our dream house, but it is what our family needs right now. Plus, I have way too many ideas and dreams for a home that I don't think would all fit into ONE house! :)

So if you think our house will look something like this,

   get ready for a shock...         

As with most urban areas in Brazil, space is at a premium, even in our little city of Mogi. And our neighborhood is quite spacious compared to others. Here's a birds eye view of our house - we have a very long and narrow plot that is 85% filled with the house. The rest is for parking and a little alley along the side.

The red box shows our house. 

Here's the front of our house.

Don't mind the crooked photo - we live on a slight hill. 

As I did with our last apartment, I'll show you our floor plan (because I love floor plans :))

We have two parking spots which is nice, because having only one car it gives the kids a little space to run around. We were also very thankful to find a house with covered parking. So you can see the width of our house/land is about as wide as two parking spots.

There are two entrances, one into the living room, and a "service" entrance which leads to the open alley/laundry/kitchen door. I have been so happy with the laundry space. In our apartment I had about 3' x 3' to maneuver between the washer and the hanging drying rack. Here I have a nice long alley with two laundry lines as well as a free standing drying rack. I use my kid's old stroller to push my laundry basket as I put up/take down the laundry.  I just have to be careful when it rains as the whole alley is not covered. So far I've only had a few pillowcases get an extra rinse. 

The kitchen was the first room we saw when we first viewed the house as we came in the service entrance. I would probably say it was the kitchen that sold me on the house because it is so much bigger than our previous one and was already furnished with all the cabinetry. 

Off the kitchen is a long hallway that connects all the other rooms. So nice to have a bathroom close to the kids room, especially with potty training going on in full force here. The rooms all basically look the same with a nice big window (looking into the alley - but we get a good amount of light). The kids have a lot of space for playing in their room as well as tons more space in the living room.

While our office doesn't have a separate door, the one in the middle of the hallway basically serves to close off the back half of the house as the "parent's" space - with our office, bedroom and bathroom. This is very useful during the day to contain the kids (and their accompanying mess) to only one half of the house. 

We were also surprised to find a "bonus room" above our bedroom that is accessed by stairs at the end of the outside alley. It is currently serving as a storage space, but we have ambitions of making it a working guest room/craft room. It also has a built in BBQ (very common in Brazilian homes, but not so common to have it in a completely closed off room.)

So I will save all the room photos for one day when the house is fully decorated and clean (ok, that day may never come, but I'll try!)

I will leave you with this photo of our awesome kitchen. I probably have three times as much counter space and cupboard space as I did in our previous apartment. (If you can't tell - it was TINY!)

There you have it - we are loving our new house and the space, and we can't really even remember what it was like living in our old tiny apartment!