the grand tour.

Well, here it is, the grand tour of our new place. We’ve finally been able to unpack and make it a little more like a home. This very well could be overload, but perhaps some of you are interested…

We do have an address, by the way!  Unfortunately, we’ve been told not to receive mail at our house, so after such work of tracking down an address, we’re supposed to use our work post office box. For those of you who would like to have an address for us, let me know and I’ll get it to you!

This is when you enter through the front door.  The “dining room” is to the right, the first door on the right is our bedroom, and the second door on the right is the guest bedroom.  The kitchen is straight to the back, with the bathroom off the kitchen to the left.

This is the living area from the other end, near the kitchen. See the place we’ve reserved for our couch? We decided to go for it, and it should be here in about two weeks!  We also are choosing fabric to have covers made for the seat cushions.  One of the Partners’ local staff who works with sewing will be making them for us.  We are also working on ordering photos to create a photo collage on this wall.

I’m still not a fan of the curtains in our house, so we’re working on finding fabric and making new ones. We also may decide to paint some walls eventually. (Currently they are a pale pink, along with the tile in the rooms.)

These two are of the guest bedroom (and laundry-drying room), which we made a little more Thai-style. One of my favorite things are to read what’s printed on the bedding at various guest houses: it’s typically odd phrases that are grammatically incorrect.  This bedding set talks about traveling the world (“I’ wish you al the happiness and joy in theworld”) and boasts buses and landmarks from around the globe. And it has mint on it, which I love!  I’m sure you all can’t wait to visit 🙂

We were excited to find our magnets for the fridge, something we did choose to bring with us (and add some in England on the way).

We like our growing collection, with a few scenes of OKC, a Spero magnet, a few Free Burma wishes, sushi from our stopover in Japan, and some souvenirs from a London market!

This is when you first walk into the bathroom.  The box on the wall is our water heater, and shower head just sprays into the entire bathroom. We keep the cement tub full to flush the squatty (below) and to shower with in hot season, when water sometimes runs short.

This is directly to the right of the shower, where we have our newly installed bathroom sink. This is a definite improvement–it used to be a five gallon bucket.  We also have our shelves to keep things dry. (Can you see the mint-colored whale toothbrush holder? Wasn’t Stephen sweet to let me pick that out?! I love it.)  And our squatty.

We’ve been creative about a few things, and we wanted to point out a few inventive solutions:

We had some candles but couldn’t find any holders, so we melted wax in the bottom of some glasses, stuck the candles in, and then supported them with rice–something extremely cheap and prevalent in this country!  We did a test, too, and even if you drop a lit match into rice, the rice puts it out.

We also haven’t been able to find a knife block here, and we wanted to keep our nice knives sharp. So, again using prevalent and cheap materials, we have this handy-dandy  storage for them.

So there you have it.  We’re really liking it and finding it pretty comfortable.  We’re excited to have photos up on the walls and continue to add some small touches, but we’re thankful to be settled in!