lifeonplanetmum.com

We saw this neat little house yesterday and it is owned by a carpenter. Gosh, he has really done up the place very nicely.  He made all his furniture and it was an impeccable piece of real estate. It is on the very lowest end of our budget, which is a real bonus. Here is the house:

It is in a cul de sac, tree lined street

This man did all his floors, the wainscoting (the detailing on the walls)

He made his own furniture too, love the coffee table (wait till you see his bed!) This is the formal living room.

Love the colour on the walls!

Formal dining

The kitchen is a challenge because it is smaller than what I would like. I would call it a kitchenette rather than a kitchen. However, it has gas, unlike most of the homes we have been into. Here, because we are so far out, most of the homes we have seen use septic tanks and well water into their pipes. They don’t have gas lines so we would have to buy propane tanks. But this house, everything is connected! Yay!

The kitchen overlooks the family room.  Check out that fireplace! See the french doors in the background? This is a smallish property, but it backs out into a huge park with a pond! It has bike trails too!

The cute little breakfast nook. We have a place for our Han Olsen tables, yay!

The powder room downstairs. I love his walls! (that is wood by the way - I know this is an unusual feature in other countries but it really makes the walls look so pretty)

Tucked behind the family room is the office which looks out into the park.

He has even a built in desk, great for our junk!

Hardwood floors in the Master Bedroom - look at his King bed…

The walk in wardrobe. Very well organised! Hard to believe this home is owned by a bachelor! He was so detailed right down to the type of door knobs he used for the doors.

The master bathroom.

Rooms are average size - ok for me to clean.

This is the smallest room upstairs. There are 4 bedrooms upstairs and one down in the basement.

The bathroom for the boys is very small but we can live with it.

The room in the basement. Legally, it is not a bedroom because it has no windows big enough for a fireman to come in through.

The basement.

The spare bathroom in the basement. A great place for our guests; parents, sisters, brothers, cousins and friends!

Back of the house. See his picnic table? We are going to ask for it, bit cheeky I know but it is beautifully made.

This is the deal breaker for us. The park. See how much space the boys will have? It doesn’t matter that our garden is small but we have a great space behind our house. You can just see the pond in the picture.

It is not perfect (would like a bigger kitchen and bathroom for the boys) but we looked at houses that were so huge and right down to the lower end of our budget. This one comes closest to all our needs and best of all, it is $200K lower than our budget.  It is a safe area, lots of families and close to our friends. This man has also allocated half his basement to a woodworking area so it is a nice place for us to potter around with my garage sale finds. Most of all, we are not overwhelmed with the maintaining and cleaning of this home.  We will make the offer today and are hopeful because we are with the nicest team of real estate agents.

I would say that God had a hand in the turn of events that took place within the last two weeks.  First of all, we were unhappy with our realtor as she had her own ideas.  She would not take us to any houses at all unless they met with her approval. So we were going to open houses on our own and we met these really nice realtors who were listing a house. As we chatted to them, we thought they were really nice people.  Later as we were about to leave, we told the lady realtor that our kids were going to the church school up the road and she exclaimed that her partner is also attending that church and his kids and grandkids attended the same school.

He offered to help us but we already had our realtor so we declined. However, we took his business card and as you know, we sacked our agent and took on this team.  This team has been extraordinary! They have worked so hard for us and we still shake our heads in disbelief at the difference between our previous realtor and this one.

They knew we were after a specific location so they sought a neighbourhood which was more up our alley but there were no listings available at that point. This is a very coveted neighbourhood, with houses in the million dollar range (so not us) but they looked up to 5 years of history to see if there were any expired or withdrawn homes.  (That meant that houses that did not sell and the owner decided to withdraw their property for sale.)  They found one! So they went there, knocked on the door, made an appointment with them to give them a presentation and invited us the very same afternoon to visit the house.

It was a smaller house, which was why we were able to afford it and it was a gorgeous community. The downside is that the house was a tad too small for us. However, the owners had done up the whole house as they were already anticipating selling it.  New kitchen, new carpets, new appliances, immaculate garden on a 1 acre plot of land.

We felt so bad that we said no to the place because I am aware how hard they tried to convince these owners to sell it to us. But they gave us no pressure and said that we had to find what suited us. They have this attitude that they are here to serve US and he said, “Quite frankly, we make a ton of money from selling and buying properties.” I appreciated his honesty.

We have been to see so many properties and the lady is very imaginative. She sees the jewel in the rough and tells us how to overcome problems like how to renovate a house to make it look better etc. She is very talented because she single handedly renovated her whole kitchen and bathroom. She took classes at Home Depot, the hardware store and told me how she put up walls, tiled her bathroom etc. Amazing! I will miss her company when we finally find a house.  Nancy and Joe are people I would consider friends. I am so glad that we found them through a by-chance meeting. But then, I don’t believe in chances!

I am giving a plug to Joe Huff and Nancy Cameron’s services. Check them out if you are in MD!

Spring just leapt into our lives about a fortnight ago. There was no gradual warming up of days, it seemed very sudden. First we were in the negatives then suddenly, it was 12 deg Celsius, then we have had very nice weekends where the temperature was 20 deg Celsius.  Leaves are starting to grow out of the branches and we can see brightly coloured birds.  I saw a red one but it flew away too quickly for me to take a photo.

James made me a card yesterday, to usher in Spring. It is really nice, as we are wearing t-shirts around the house now.

Wow, what a mad weather this has been! The snow stopped yesterday evening and this morning, the skies were brilliant blue. I would say that this time, the snow is more than the last one, about 28 plus inches.  Normally, the snow plough trucks clean up our roads several times a day when it snows but it has been more than 24 hours and no sign of the ploughs. The tree next to our house cracked and fell on the neighbour’s house from the weight of the snow.  The neighbour across of us was awoken at 1.30am because a tree fell on his deck and onto their picnic table. Fortunately, none of these trees fell through our roofs.

This is what our street/road looks like. There is no way out.

We had two power outages, one during the night on the first night of the snow. That lasted for six hours and when we got up, the house was freezing cold. Power came back on in the morning but it kept going on and off till finally, just as we sat down to dinner, the power went off for a longer period.  James was terrified of the dark but luckily we had some candles which I bought as gifts.  It turned out to be very cosy but we were getting concerned about the cold setting in.  We started putting on our layers of coats and ugg boots. Luckily it lasted for 30 mins and we were able to enjoy James’ first attempt at making brownies on his own.

We are getting a bit concerned because on Tuesday and Wednesday, there is another snow fall predicted, this time, 8 inches.  At this rate, we will be stuck indoors until Thursday! Am getting worried about the staples like milk, eggs and bread running out - now I know why there is a mad rush to get these at the stores! 

Matt has no work tomorrow, a plus in all of this! The boys’ school will be cancelled tomorrow and Tuesday, which means they have run out of their snow days and the schools will be extending their school year, which effects our flights out of here back to Malaysia.

There was an incident at the start of the school year involving one of my boys that made me realise how both of them needed to learn some self defense. So, we enrolled them to do karate twice a week.

It has so many benefits. It is more than just fitness or self defense.  I love the teachers of karate here, they are very encouraging to kids and are fine role models for the children. The teachers here are young men and they start a karate lesson each time with a social lesson. Last month it was “Respect” and he talks for 5 mins about ways we show respect to our friends, parents, teachers.  This month, it is about goal setting.  The boys look up to the teachers because they did some really cool things, like break concrete with their elbows and displayed all these super-strength feats.

I tried to enrol James for karate in Singapore with a renowned karate teacher but withdrew him after the first lesson because the “Master” kicked James very hard to punish him when James forgot to call him “Master.” I rang him and voiced my displeasure that such a person like him who was trying to teach children about control lost it over something which was merely a mistake. He was incensed that I challenged his authority in his arena. So different from here.

Aside from that, I was very happy to see that a lot of what we used to do in Occupational Therapy with Cameron is done during karate.  Some OTs recommend karate for children with motor planning delays, dyspraxia and low muscle tone.

So after 3 months of karate, they were ready to move on to their first belt test. The boys made it! They are now officially gold belt.  What is so neat about it is that they have a different test system for kids - makes sense because which child would want to wait a year before progressing to another belt? It has done so much for their motivation and excitement for the sport. They both had to break a board by kicking it.

Here are the boys, flushed and happy with their first achievement. Way to go boys!

I LOVE the libraries here, they are smaller than Singapore but their range of books is so much wider. How is that possible? Matt and I scratch our heads over this. I have found many books on topics that I cannot find in Singapore. The only plausible reason we can think of is because the libraries in Singapore stock books in four main languages, Malay, Chinese, Tamil and of course English.  Here, they have Spanish, Korean, Chinese and German. However, they are only dedicated to a few shelves. We are allowed to borrow 50 books per person and up to 10 DVDs. Wow! It sure beats borrowing 8 books or 4 books and 4 DVDs per time in Singapore (and this was the premium account where we had to pay $42 per year) Here library membership is FREE!

Anyway, I was at the local library two weeks ago, and wandered into the kids section. I was most surprised to see this:

It was a small section but it was the Singapore Maths textbooks from Primary 1 to 6! Singapore Mathematics have gained a lot of international recognition and about 2 years ago, some of the American schools in the West Coast collaborated with the Singapore Education Ministry to incorporate their maths systems into their public schools.  Some states were not happy with their Maths curriculum.

James has never done Singapore Maths at the American School so I bought him a few text books to get him going. He is very strong in Maths but he struggles with the Primary 1 (Grade 1) challenging Maths questions.

Take this one - bear in mind this is a GRADE 1 question:

There is a total of 8 bicycles and cars in a car park. I can see 26 wheels altogether. How many cars are there? 

There was a Grade 2 question which really stumped Matt and I too but for the life of me I cannot remember it.

So when we left Singapore, we thought that we would have to buy some text books for James to keep his skills up but it looks like the libraries are well stocked here!

I am looking out for a chest of drawers from Dorothy Draper but they are so expensive (between US$1,400 and $16,000) and I was wondering if there was a way for me to create one on my own. Her pieces are so rare and I feel envious when people write on blog posts how they pick it up at garage sales for $50 or something unbelievable!

This one is available from a cool shop in DC called Sixteen Fifty Nine.

Then you have the knockoffs on ebay:

I am going to attempt to make it myself one day. Don’t know how but I have a rough plan in my head already!

From midnight tonight till Sunday, our city is expecting snowfall and they are anticipating about 12 inches of snow in DC. As we live a little further up north, we will probably be seeing more than 12 inches. We are REALLY feeling the cold now, it is not windy like the winters in Melbourne (which also makes it colder than it seems) The cold here is sharp - hurts our ears and fingers, we have to wear muffs and gloves. It was a -7 deg C this morning, with a top of 2 deg.  People keep saying that February is brutal…yikes.

I was going to sit for my driver’s license test tomorrow but got a call, the Motor Vehicle Dept might be closed tomorrow so they cancelled.  We got a notice from church to say service might be cancelled and school might be cancelled on Monday!  I wish Matt gets a call from work to say, no need to come to work too!

Luckily, I was prepared for this weather. Yesterday, I went to Costco and bought these…

As Cameron was also home today because he has pink eye, we went down to the pond to see if it was frozen and we were surprised to see the ducks!  They were swimming in the middle part of the pond which was not frozen. We fed them some bread and they were very hungry. I have a funny video of them walking on the ice, and their feet going in all directions as they slipped on the ice, trying to get to the bread.

Looks like we will be having a very quiet weekend, all cooped up indoors!

Did I mention before that I love ebay?

I used to love this series of books where you got to be the master of your own destiny.  My mother, bless her, is a hoarder and she kept most of our stuff from when we were little.  Before we left Singapore for the USA, she asked me to take my books and toys with me for the boys. I was pleased to see my old collection of Enid Blyton books and also these series.

James is starting to get into the chapter books now, after having finished the whole Diary Of A Wimpy Kid series, I thought he might like to read the Choose Your Own Adventure (I’m going to abbreviate this to CYOA) line.  Surprisingly, it wasn’t James who took to it, it was Cameron! As he can’t really read that proficiently yet, I read them to him at bed time.

I only have a few of those books left and decided to do a search on ebay. What do you know, there was a whole lot of 59 vintage CYOA books being sold! Of course there was a bidding war and I used an auction sniper to make sure I won it, and I did. The books came to about $2 each which was a real bargain as they would cost so much more on Amazon. I don’t know who was more excited, the boys or myself!

I finally get a chance to talk to Matt tonight, to find out what is really going on.  He worked from home today but he was quite cheerful during his conference calls, joking and everything but glum and moping around the house.

He finally spills the beans.  He feels that he has given up an extremely good situation in Singapore, higher salary, easier lifestyle, better weather, safer place - all for this in DC.  We are saving nothing - we did not know the cost of living here was higher than in Singapore.  I know where he is coming from.  He is thinking of asking his previous employer if they will take him back but oh the unlikeliness of that happening.  He doesn’t know if it is the illness talking. 

Nevertheless, we are here, we knew it would be tough and this is only the beginning.