House tour - part 1

If you're anything like me, you love having a nosy look around other peoples' houses are interested in architecture and interior design ;-)

Anyway, I thought some of you might enjoy a little guided tour of our house. It may be a little unorthodox, but we'll start today with the upstairs. This is purely because I have some photos of the upstairs in a (generally) tidy condition. I don't yet have such pictures of the downstairs! The following photos weren't all taken at the same time either; it rarely looks tidy in several rooms at the same time...

So, we'll start at the front door. Slide open the door and come in!

The gray tiled area is where you take off your shoes before stepping up onto the wooden floor, where you'll find slippers lined up for guests. The door on the right leads into a storage room, very useful in keeping this area tidy. The stairs are directly ahead of you, behind the pot-plant and the slatted screen, so let's go upstairs...

Halfway up, the stairs turn back on themselves, and then you'll reach the landing:

You can see the messy bookshelves on the right and ahead through the doorway into K's room.To the left of K's room, behind that blank wall, is my little room.

Next, standing in front of K's room and looking back down the stairs...

The door on the left leads into the toilet. The little landing area is a magnet for H's junk - this is the vastly improved, tidied version he produced just before my parents came in March. In the bottom right corner of the photo above you can see a little Alice-in-Wonderland door. This leads into a little attic, the roof space above the bathroom, where H keeps more junk valued treasures.

I can't say much about tidiness though. Here's a quick glimpse of my office/sewing room/junk storage (please look away quickly):

Right, let's move on to K's room, here viewed from the doorway:

And now from the far corner, next to the closet and black chair, looking back towards the door:

Above the little bookcase there is a multiplication chart. No, we're not pushing him to be a maths genius before he starts school, that was the one thing he wanted in the gift shop at Paignton Zoo last summer. Yup, at the zoo. Not a cuddly koala or cool crocodile, but a times tables poster...

You can't really see it very well, but the collection of bits of paper pinned to the wall below the air conditioner is yet another solar system display...

OK, out of K's room and turn left. The height chart is on the side of the bookshelves on the landing, and the door at the end of the hall leads up to the loft. The loft has permanent stairs and is fully floored, but is high up under the roof so you have to keep your head down (my technique) or bang it on the rafters (preferred by H). To the right of the loft door is the door into our room, and to the left is the spare room.

Looking into our room, from the doorway:

Actually things have changed a bit now and T no longer sleeps with us, but this was how it was when it was tidy enough to photograph. There's his cot and chest of drawers in the corner, complete with a couple of cuddlies and the lovely birth sampler Mum made for him:

From the far corner of the room you can see quite a collection of doorways. Behind the open room door there is a sliding door which leads into a walk-in closet. The open door on the left leads into a shower room; quite unusual in Japan, where most houses have a main bathroom downstairs (as we do), and nothing else. The open door beyond that is the toilet, which has a second door going back to the top of the stairs. I'd like to get some nicer furniture for our room, to replace the camping chair we leave our clothes on, the plastic drawers with my underwear in I use as a bedside table and the little rickety cupboard we acquired when H's brother was throwing it out during a house move 8 years ago...

Finally, the spare room - possibly the nicest and least used room in the house. From the doorway (yes, that's the same chair in the corner you just saw in K's room. I don't mean the same style, it really is the same chair...):

And from that chair, looking back at the doorway:

And across at the under-stair space:

T has now moved into this room but, being reluctant to get rid of the spare bed, he sleeps in that little under-stair space. Actually, K usually sleeps in the spare bed now, and it's not unusual to find me there too. But that's a story for another day... :-)

 

*** Part 2 of the house tour can now be found here! ***