House tours, day 2

The tour continues for all two of you who are enjoying it! Step through the doorway from my hall/mudroom into my living room:

This is a tough room to photograph because it is actually quite large. We've got it set up with a living room area and a playroom area, not that the toys don't migrate all over the place anyway. Here's the living room part. I desperately need a big plant or something in the corner (I have the perfect thing sitting in a storage facility in suburban New Jersey... sigh). And if anyone has ideas for filling that very large, very empty wall, I'm all ears. Right now, the focal point is Paul's pride and joy, our new HDTV, purchased courtesy of my brother's pet project.

Behind the couches is the playroom area. These windows get beautiful light for the 6 minutes a day when it's not dark out, making for a nice, sunny play space. We've set up some fabulous train patterns back here, and I love the fact that this area is out of the way enough that I don't feel compelled to break them down every night. As much as I miss my nice big house with lots of rooms, I have to admit that one very large living space is actually much more practical with small children underfoot.
If you turn around from the spot where I was standing to take that last shot, you're looking through our dining room into our kitchen (that's the front door off to the left). This butcher block table was a HUGE mistake. We ought it thinking how nice and easy it would be to sand out marker stains, etc. What we failed to realize was that everything would stain this damn table, necessitating much more frequent sanding than we're ever likely to actually tackle. Oh, well. At least it was cheap... our old kitchen table was equally gross, and we'd actually spent some money on that one.
Here we are in my kitchen. Take a few minutes to remember our old kitchen cabinets that we hated with a passion. Get all the laughter out of your system. Are you done? Great. Then we'll continue...
Ironically, we did briefly consider just putting in dark granite counter tops and cool cabinet pulls before we ended up deciding to re-do our whole New Jersey kitchen. Here is proof that it probably would have worked, because I don't actually hate this kitchen nearly as much as our old one. Nonetheless, I miss the warmth of our cherry cabinets. This kitchen is not really me. Or maybe it is me and I just don't know it, since these silly cabinets seem to follow me everywhere I go.
That's the tour for today, folks! Tomorrow (or maybe this afternoon, depending on how ambitious I get), we'll turn right and head down the hall to the bedrooms. Oooh... Ahhhh....