House Tour, Part 2

Here's the second part of my house tour. This picture is facing our front door. I feel I have to explain that I realize my decorating style has gone a step or two beyond "minimalist" and into a style that can only be described as stark. It's not exactly what I'd choose, given ideal circumstances. When we moved here we decided to keep what we brought to a minimum, not knowing how much it would cost to ship and whether my husband's company would cover the expense both ways. If I could do everything over, I'd bring a few more things with us, including a few pictures and decorative items.

Is this kitchen about as far away as possible from your imaginings of what an English kitchen would look like? It features an Ikea dishwasher, stovetop, double oven and refrigerator. I don't think I'd ever go quite this modern myself. I will have to say though, that I don't think it could do better at maximizing storage for the amount of space it has. The oven wall is about half traditional cabinets and half pull-out cabinets. I've actually never had a kitchen with so much storage space.

Our eating area, between the kitchen and office space. Ignore the laundry basket I didn't put away in the background.

 Our well-used computer space.

This is the same space, looking towards a small bathroom, small laundry closet (both newish and not worth picturing) and upper balcony.

Our office area is under the skylight and bay window from the spare room.

Our living room. The doors usually can slide all the way open, which is really nice in the summer. I tried opening them for the first time since early fall for this picture and got the door stuck open in the half-open position you see in the photo. I hope the property manager comes soon, because it is a little chilly with it open in January. Back in the summertime the door easily slid open and closed.

A view from the other direction. 

We have a little brick shed in the back of our garden.

This is the view from my front door on this gray morning.

Many of the homes on my street feature one of these. Do you know what it is? A boot scraper.

They also often have one of these rings. Handy for tying up your horse - or bike.

And there it is. I hope you've enjoyed the tour, even if it probably wasn't what you were expecting.

House Tour, Part 1

I got a special request for a house tour, so here it goes. I'm proceeding despite the fact that I'm pretty sure that your imaginings of my English home are much better than the reality. I live in a traditional English terraced house, on a traditional English street. There's even a sign in our window that declares that someone I've never heard of lived here in 1891, so it's at least that old. But, there's very little traditional about the inside of our house, as you'll soon see. At some point the house was extended, and the kitchen was moved from the back of the house to the front. Very little in the way of period details remain. (If you want to see a tour of my neighborhood, I did that here: http://infinitedealofnothing.blogspot.co.uk/2013/06/welcome-to-my-neighborhood.html)

This is the sight you see as you walk in the front door.

At the top of the stairs is this landing with a skylight.

When we first moved in I imagined myself spending winter afternoons sitting here in a pool of sunlight; however, I'd forgotten that the winter sun doesn't rise high enough for that. It's still nice to have a house full of natural light in the dark days of winter.

Turning the other direction you see a hallway that leads to a spare room, Camille's room, a bathroom, and a staircase that leads to the top bedroom, which Anya has claimed.

 The top bedroom is a small room with a steep roof and skylights on each side.

This is the view from Anya's bed to the other side of the room. The room is so small I found it difficult to find an angle that takes in the whole thing at once.

Anya's room has the best views in the house. This is the street side view from her skylight.

Anya and Camille looking out the back side skylight.

Here is the view from her back skylight. The flat roof is the rest of our house, and then of course the roofs of some of our neighbors' homes. Cambridge seems to have many occasions that call for fireworks and we generally have a great view standing on Anya's bed and looking out her skylight.

Now we're back down one floor to the street side bedroom that Camille has claimed. Camille's room has the only hint of period detail in that her room has this (nonworking) fireplace. The rest of the room barely fits her double bed and a little desk.

This is the bathroom, obviously. Everything in it is fairly new. You can kind of see that like most English bathrooms, it has a radiator that doubles as a towel warmer.

On the back garden side of the skylight is the master bedroom and master bath. The whole area it occupies is part of the newish extension.

I'm not going to include a picture of our spare room (another small room) and our master bedroom (smallish square room filled with way too much furniture for its size to help compensate for no closets). This is the view from our master bedroom into the back yard. It looks like you'd feel lacking in privacy because of all the windows facing the bedroom from the brown house. The house is unoccupied though, apparently due to some bitter divorce or court proceedings or some such, so we don't have to worry about it. The green space is ours. You can see a stone wall that separates our space from a shared private walkway out to the street and then the start of our neighbor's back space.

There's part one of your tour. Next time I'll show your our kitchen, office, living room and garden space.

Town or Country?

We're deciding where to live. My husband's company is in a (supposedly - I haven't seen it) picturesque village called Saffron Walden, about 20 miles outside of Cambridge. So we could live in Saffron Walden, or it would be an easy commute by train or car from Cambridge. Town or country? They both have their merits:

Town
more schools within an easy distance
closer access to shops and activities
easy to get around without a car

Country
charm of living in a country home
more space, both in the home and garden
less traffic, crowding

I have a feeling this is not the street we'll be living on in Cambridge. I do hope to find a cute row house ("terraced house" if I'm going to attempt to go all British English) though. Sadly, my husband has not taken any photos of the Saffron Walden area for me to share.

It's been a hard decision, but I think we are going to try to get a place centrally located in Cambridge. One motivation is that we can get around without a car. My husband can easily walk to the train station and take the train to work. I will be able to walk, bike and take the bus around town. Learning to drive on the other side of the road scares me! It's all the moments of driving when you're not concentrating but get around just fine based on all your experience and instincts that give me pause: my experience and instincts will be all wrong. I also like that living in Cambridge will make it easy to use Zipcar, a car sharing company. You pay an hourly or daily rate to rent the car that includes gas and insurance. It would save us all the hassle of buying and then selling a car, in addition to figuring out parking and insurance.

The other reason I think the city will work for us is schools. From what I can tell, England has a school system that doesn't guarantee that your child will get into their neighborhood school. If this happens, in Cambridge we'll have other convenient options. If we didn't get into the Saffron Walden schools, we'd be stuck driving a long way every day to get the kids to school.

Now we're just waiting for my husband's work visa to be complete before signing a rental contract. Just having the decision made feels like an accomplishment.