Anniversary, and a Half

Today is Jayme's one year anniversary with the new job! I guess we probably can stop calling it "new" now, right? Looking back to last year, this was all terrifyingly new and extremely exciting, while also being dreadfully sad because we knew we were going to have to move. We loved our sweet little town and our fantastic schools and neighbors. The silver lining was that, for the first time in our entire marriage, we would be within an hour of 90% of our families on each side. That has been so great, I can't even tell you! We slogged through the first four months with Jayme travelling back and forth and only seeing him on weekends. Then once we moved we had our two months of living in our RV at my parents house while we waited for our house to be built. Which brings me to the "Half" Anniversary.
Three days ago marked our 6 month anniversary of being in the new house. Yes, I know I haven't shown any pictures here on the blog and I don't have an excuse other than, no room is quite "finished" but are they ever? We still have loads of pictures to put up on the walls and Raley needs a bed frame and Clay's room is never clean and Pattie's is only when I do the cleaning. But I do have some pictures of the kitchen and my office, so I will share those today.

Kitchen first!! This is the view from the living room. We have three stools at the breakfast bar. On the left side is the dining area and on the right is the doorway into the kitchen.

This is the view from the doorway into the kitchen. On the right is the pantry.

Stepping in a little closer for the view from the pantry.

To the right is a small counter and cabinetry where I keep my Keurig and cookbooks and such. Also the doorway into the office is on the left. There is the pantry door on the right.

Spinning in the same spot, here is the sink view to the living room.

And here is the shot through to the dining area.

Last, but not least, from the dining area, back through the kitchen. The open door you can see is to the laundry and out from there to the garage. You can also see the stairs leading up.

On the extreme right hand side of the picture above you can see a sliver of the door to Harry Potter's room. We did something fun in there! DVD storage; 24 linear feet worth!!

The house plans called the area off the kitchen a "breakfast room" and the room to the right as you enter the house was the "dining room". Since our table fit comfortably in the breakfast space, we repurposed the "dining room" to be my office. I say My office because I use it most, but until we put a computer upstairs for the kids, we all use this space for any computer work or play. We have never had real office furniture so that was what we wanted to get. Here is what we picked.

Nice, heavy, real wood, will last forever. I had picked a more feminine desk but it had no drawers for all my crap highly useful items, and they were out of stock when we went to buy it. So we went with this honking big one. We have decorated it with our Texas/Western/horse items for the most part. Closer views: In this one you can see the doorway through to the kitchen.

Yes, that is my saddle. Well, my Western saddle anyway. My English saddle is at a friend's house.

And a little closer to the bookshelf. You can see all our diplomas up on top. Someday we will frame those and hang them instead but this works for now.

We were able to fit all of our books, fiction, nonfiction, kids stuff, textbooks we kept from college, even the photo albums in the bookcase. Very exciting stuff!!
I hope this wasn't too boring. I will try to get the rest of the house in order at some point. I can't stand the way our living room is arranged right now so I won't be taking any pictures of that until I can fix it, but as I get pictures up I may post those. In any case, Happy Not-So-Wordless Wednesday!