Our Apartment

I never did show you all where we are living right now.  This is Birchover apartments. The most interesting room is the kitchen.  You may look at this kitchen and say, "wow, look at all those cupboards."  But no, everything on the left side of the kitchen is an appliance.  From left to to right is our freezer, refrigerator, and washer/"dryer".  I'll explain later why I put the dryer in quotations.  Anyway, it's a rather functional kitchen, only lacking in a dishwasher.  But since we don't have many dishes, that's not a big deal. 

The dining/living room is attached to the kitchen.  Here, Avery and Mia are working on their first email letters to friends in the States. 

Our living room is shown below, 2 love seats and a coffee table, TV, etc.  It works fine for us.  You'll notice the clothes drying on a rack in the background.  That's because the dryer part of the Washer/Dryer doesn't work.  And apparently, that's no mistake.  Dryers in England are condensing dryers, there's no hot air and minimal heat applied during the "drying" process...mainly spinning.  So I could run the dryer for 2 full hours and my clothes come out wetter than they would be at home with my high efficiency washer.  So all of our clothes are hung to dry...and we are learning to wear our clothes many more times than normal before washing.  I'm told that the dryer in the rental house does work better, but it's still nothing like dryers in the states.  I guess it must have something to do with homes not being wired with the power capacity that American dryers consume.

We have 2 bedrooms, this one below is ours.  The kids share a bedroom that is the same size, with a cot on the end of the bed for Avery.  We couldn't get the kids to go to sleep on time when they were all in the same room together, so for now, one child sleeps in our bed until when we go to bed and then we move him/her into the kids room.  Both rooms have what they call an "en suite" which means attached bathroom.

So that's where we are living until next Tuesday.  We just got word yesterday that it looks like our air shipment will be delivered to our rental house on 8/30 so that's moving day for us.  I am very excited to be living in a house again!