After what feels like years of unpacking (but was really only a week) the new place is pretty much set up. Not surprisingly, unpacking all the boxes from the moving companies and decorating has taken up most of my free time this week and kept me from doing anything social whatsoever. My social skills are rapidly deteriorating.

I love the cozy charm of the new place, though it took a while for me to catch the vision for it since the layout is so different from our condo. The new place is a cute little house that’s been converted into a duplex. I’d love to show you a picture form the outside, but decided against it for safety reasons. But you can see the inside!

Here’s what it looks like when you walk in the front door. (Sorry these pictures aren’t the greatest, but I was too lazy to pull out the real camera).

As you can see, we didn’t do any painting to the new place, partly because we were sick and tired of painting and partly because our new landlords don’t really want us to. I miss our fun accent walls and think a new coat of paint could do wonders for the bedroom, but having more windows in the living area means more light and more fun curtains which helps to keep things bright and colorful.

The kitchen has plenty of floor space, but not a ton of cabinet space. There’s also no dishwasher (:() and no pantry so we converted our game/dvd storage shelves into a pantry.

The spiral staircase is a cool feature, though not especially practical since you have to actually take the staircase apart and remove it in order to get furniture up into the loft. I still don’t know how we got this sectional up there.

Fun fact: my parents’ house (the house I grew up in) also has a spiral staircase. In high school I had the upstairs bedroom and it felt like I lived in the tower room of a castle (In my imagination anyway). This has had the dual effect of endearing me to spiral staircases everywhere and at the same time being less impressed with them than most people are.

The upstairs loft area was a little tricky to figure out. It’s a large amount of floor space, but because of the oddly angled ceiling, not all of it is easy to use. We decided to make two separate areas with an office space and a reading/sitting area.

The bedroom is the one room I’m still unhappy with and this is mainly because it needs to be painted and the curtain situation is abysmal. Most of the windows in the house came with those cheap plastic curtain rods already installed. Of course these don’t look as nice as real rods, but I could have gotten over that if only the rods were installed in the right place. Instead of installing the rods a little above the window frame and wider than the window itself, the rods are attached right to the frame resulting in windows that look tiny and cramped with ugly white poles showing through. It’s not so bad in the living room and even the dining area, but I really don’t like it in the bedroom. Eventually we may be able to fix this with new, properly placed rods and better curtains, but we don’t have the budget for it right now. I know this probably bothers me more than anyone else and it’s certainly not important in the grand scheme of things, but there you have it.

Hope you enjoyed a little glimpse into our home and lives and stick around for more adventures to come! Also, I really am working on getting some more posts up this month that are more of my usual style. Moving twice, looking for work, writing freelance article,s and re-acclimating to America have taken a lot of my time and energy over the past few months, but there are so many things I want to share with you and I’m looking forward to getting back to writing here.

If you have an adventure to share, add your link to the link-up by clicking the button below. You can also click this button to read other bloggers’ adventures. You can participate in all of the adventures or you can just do a few. If you missed last week’s adventure about the big move  and our first time using a moving company, you can find it here. And if you are new to my Fifty-Two Weeks of Adventure project you can find out more about it here.