Moving Day!

Well, one of them anyway.

We are in the process of moving out of TLF and into our new home. We're spending one last night in TLF (where we have beds and a functional kitchen!) but tomorrow we will officially have a new home. Because there is so much junk to pack into the (rented) van, I don't have a lot of time tonight. (And where on earth did all this "junk" come from?! It's nuts!) I thought it might be fun to post a comparison pic of our German house and the new house here in California. Here we go!

This is the front of our home in Germany. It was a 4-story (including the basement) townhome located roughly two miles from the base gate. It had 4 bedrooms and (approximately) 1800 square feet of living space. We picked it due to its proximity to the base and because of the backyard. It was a nice place to live and we spent three of our seven years there. (Sorry about the snow pics. They were the only ones I could find on the laptop.)

And this is the back. Unfortunately that second story balcony could only be accessed from two of the kids' rooms so it rarely got used. The positive side of that was that our bedroom took up the entire top floor. It was a really great room. The only way it could have been better? A door. It was a very, very open room. Ahem.

We've been researching homes in the Beale AFB area for as long as we knew that was where we were going. We wanted to have some sort of idea what the "norm" was, which I am sure is something that the majority of you understand! We solicited opinions from as many military people as we could find, did a lot of reading on our own, joined a Yahoo group to ask the opinions of locals, and scoured the internet for pictures of homes within our rental cap.

We looked at a bunch, but only went into four homes. This is the third house we toured and we knew it was the one as soon as we walked inside. It only has three bedrooms, but it has tons of storage and over 2000 square feet. The boys loved the area enough that they volunteered to share a bedroom in order to live here. (We had originally hoped to get a 4 bedroom but did not really like either of the 4 bedrooms available here in this area.)

Here is the front. This was taken when the carpet guy was cleaning the carpets, so ignore the blue hoses running into the house. Also, the landlords are doing a bunch of work on the house and those stairs are new. They will be painted to match the rest of the woodwork soon.

And here is the back. The porch is HUGE and will be a great play area for the kids. The yard is very unique (more later). The boys are IN LOVE with the house. I can't wait to start planting some things and fixing it up a little. I think some spring bulbs would be a lot of fun.

We are so happy with it that it's really kind of disgusting. We're those "too-happy" people you run into sometimes. Yeah, you know the ones. I'm sure the bloom will wear off a little at some point and we'll go back to "normal", but it's a lot of fun right now!

Oh! And our bedroom? It has a door. With a lock.