Welcome Home, Part 1: The Living Room

Now that the spiders are gone (hurrah for my non-squeamish husband), I’d like to invite you all to visit. You’ve been dying to come to Disneyworld for ages anyway, right?

Since we’ve had no immediate takers in the visitor department, here’s the first installment in my little virtual home tour.

First of all, I can’t even begin to say how in love I am with our new house. This may be partially a result of the fact that we haven’t lived in our own house with our own stuff for two whole years. Oh, and there’s the little matter that this is move number twenty of our eight-year marriage (you do the math). We’ve inhabited some pretty interesting dwellings during that time. Like the “spacious” apartment that turned out to be a studio in Florence. Or the cockroach-infested kitchen in Manila (not that I have cockroaches on the brain here in Florida. No, not at all).

It’s so lovely to have all my earthly possessions back; things like familiar pictures on the walls and all my books and my ten foot long body pillow (I almost no longer need a husband to sleep with at night. Just kidding, Tony).

Unfortunately, I’m neither a decorator nor a photographer, so I can’t quite do the house justice. But I wanted to invite you in and show you, so you can feel as snuggly about it as I do (and maybe give me some decorating tips too!).

So, tadadaDA! Welcome to the Familia homestead.

Yes, our house really is kind of purple in real life.

Here’s the doorway. I forgot to sweep it before the picture, but I would probably forget to sweep it before you visited too. Go ahead, come in.

There’s this cute little set of three built-in shelves to the right of the door as you walk in.

Here’s the part where I ask you for advice. As I look at my photo, it seems like the thing I did wrong was arrange all three shelves so similarly, with one big thing in the middle, and little things around. Any suggestions for arranging it more artistically, or other things I should add to make it look better?

Anyway, to the left is the living room, which Tony thinks is a little too stiff and formal, but I think it is really cosy and fun.

This is also our library/music room. The majority of my book collection is housed here, and you can just see my harp peeking out from behind the couch.

I have my same decorating problem here, though, with what to do on top of the bookshelves. Do I have to cave and get fake plants? Or is there something else you can put on top of bookshelves that looks nice?

Here is the living room from the other side:

It is so nice to have a piano to play again!

So there you have it. Miss Scarlett, in the living room, with the guitar. Stay tuned later to journey deeper into the recesses of my favorite house ever.