4 Moms Open House: Living Areas

This is week 3 of the month long Open House tour hosted by 4 Moms. You can visit the 4 mom’s pics here for Kimberly at Raising Olives, here for the Deputy Headmistress at The Common Room, here for Connie at Smockity Frocks, and here for KimC at Life in a Shoe.

This weeks tour focus is on Living Areas.

Our first living area is the Living Room that houses our piano...and pretty much nothing else. ;) The recliner you see is much loved and after 8 kids is almost completely worn out. The duck pics that you see here were our anniversary presents to ourselves many moons ago.

This is a crucifix that Andy's grandfather made and had hanging in their house for many years. It's made out of brass and has one of those old time soda can tabs as the hanger.
This corner house religious items that are made out of olive wood from Bethlehem.
This is our family photo wall. Every time we have a child, the photos need to get rearranged so they are still symmetrical.
I love this throw! We got it after seeing Noah at Sights and Sounds theater in Pennsylvannia. My mom made the lighthouse stained glass piece that is on the right hand side of the pic.

Next up would be what I guess you could call a rec room. The room houses a pool table that we got as a family Christmas present a few years ago...
a foosball table that we've had forever (back left of this pic). Up until a couple of weeks ago, it also contained a small air hockey game but the kids played that so much that it literally fell apart. In the back right hand corner you can just barely make out a desk. I love this desk! It was my grandfathers and it's huge. Right now, my daughter has taken it over but once it gets refinished, one of these days, I'm taking it back. ;)
This is our photo wall...it contains all the kids birth pictures on the bottom, their most recent pic on top and a group shot of all the kids on the far left.


Next is our family room, the room we spend most of our time in...this room always comes with at least a few munchkins. ;)
Hiding under the blanket along the left hand wall of this picture is a beautiful table chess table. We got this as one of our family Christmas presents too.

And here is a peak into our classroom...this room also comes with at least one munchkin. :) The bookcases, tables and red chairs in this room came from when my company remodeled our work areas. I wish now that I'd gotten more. There's actually another bookcase that you can't see in these pics so there is plenty of storage in here.

I have no idea why this last pic turned out so small... the shelf on the wall is homemade an holds trophies that the kids have earned thru various activities...mostly softball and piano awards.
That completes the tour of our living areas. Thanks for visiting. Be sure to check out everyone else's pics by clicking on one of the links at the beginning of the post.

4 Moms Open House: Kitchen and Dining Room

The 4 Moms are doing a month long Open House posted each Thursday and the second one is Kitchen and Dining Room. You can visit their pics back to the 4 mom’s here for Kimberly at Raising Olives, here for the Deputy Headmistress at The Common Room, here for Connie at Smockity Frocks, and here for KimC at Life in a Shoe.

This is a view of the far end of our kitchen. We remodeled a number of years ago and this room used to be our dining room. Before we remodeled, the pass through you see used to be a doorway into a sunroom.


Here you are standing right inside the doorway. There used to be a wall that divided the two rooms right where the counter juts out. We discovered just how shoddy some of the work that had been done on this house was when we went to remove that wall...it was only held up by two nails. The doorway you see to the right is another entrance into what used to be the sunroom and is now our dining area....we don't have a formal dining room in the house, as you will see.


A view from the other corner of the room...the main entry way is just out of sight to your left. The lovely duct tape that you can see on the microwave is courtesy of our youngest who decided to hit the microwave one day with a big spoon. How he could reach that high is beyond me...he was only 1 1/2yr old at the time.
This is a view when standing in the doorway mentioned above. Prior to remodeling there used to be sliding glass doors in both this doorway and in the pass through area.



This is our dining room table...had a hard time getting it all in the pic. ;) We still have 3 more leaves that can go into it. It's called a reunion table and seats 16 comfortably although we have had up to 20 around it at one time. The nice thing about this table is that it is extra wide so there is plenty of room for food in the middle and you still have room for your plates and stuff around the edges.

The milk jugs that you can see on the freezer in this pic are a homeschool project...at some point these will turn into piggy banks.


Even though we did the remodeling of the kitchen years ago, we never seem to get around to painting it. Something always seems to come up that takes any spare money we might have. But one of these days I would love to paint it a lovely shade of green and have yellow accents.

That concludes the tour of our kitchen/dining room. Hope you enjoyed it and thanks for stopping by! You can check out the links at the top of this post for others in the tour. :)

4 Moms Open House: Yard and Entry

I know I'm late on this but I just ran across this Open House Tour on Raising Olives blog and thought it was a neat idea. The 4 Moms are doing a month long Open House posted each Thursday and the first one is Yard and Entry. You can visit their pics back to the 4 mom’s here for Kimberly at Raising Olives, here for the Deputy Headmistress at The Common Room, here for Connie at Smockity Frocks, and here for KimC at Life in a Shoe.

We are a family of 10 that live in a 7 bedroom house (that sounds grander than it actually is, believe me) that was built in 1978. When we purchased the house in 1994, it only contained 3 bedroom. Since then we've made a number of renovations, the biggest of which was the addition over the garage that gave us another 3 bedrooms and a bathroom. Only 5 of the rooms are currently being used as a bedroom...one is a playroom and another is a den/office. We have 5 boys and 3 girls...the girls are all in one room, two boys (twins) in a second, our 2 oldest boys in the 3rd, the baby (he'll be 2 soon so not much of a baby anymore) in the 4th and us in the 5th.

The tour begins with a view of our house from the road...
and a side view. This is usually where our garden is at this time of year but the last couple of years have been so miserable and that combined with all the rain we had at the beginning of planting season, prompted us not to put one in this year.
Continuing around this side of the house brings you to our back yard. It includes a lovely pool for cooling off on the hot days that we have...

a trampoline to try and wear the kids out although at the moment it needs some repair work done to it before the kids can jump on it, a soccer goal and a small playground for the younger kids...

and a lovely chicken coop that houses some really sweet chicken and a crazy looking rooster. I should have taken a pic of him as he looks like he stuck his claw in an electric socket...he has feathers on his head that stick out in every direction...


This is a view of the back yard from our deck...

This is our deck, which is not nearly big enough for all the people we have running around on it. One of these days I would love to extend it to the other end of the house...

and last but not least, our entryway. This is the front entrance to our house. If you go up the stairs, you end up in our living room. That's our cat, Oscar, coming down the stairs. The doorway you can just make out in the upper right of the pic leads into our kitchen. If you go down the stairs, you end up in a rec room...but this is how we usually get into our house, thru the garage and into our laundry room...

Thanks for visiting!