Ian's New House

For Ian's first birthday, we bought him a house. It's a little house, as is fitting for a little boy. He has agreed to let Mommy, Daddy, and the dogs live in his new house with him.

Doug and I have been very happy with our simple urban living experiment (in which we got rid of most of our stuff and moved downtown, downsizing from 2500 to 1300 square feet). We're ready to permanently embrace our new minimalist lifestyle and will be moving into a 1000 square foot, newly renovated, historic Craftsman bungalow in an up-and-coming (recovering) neighborhood even closer to downtown than we are now. Our house has quite a story. It came this close to being bulldozed last year (the full story is documented on a great Durham blog here):



The house has a sister house next door, which has just been moved into by our soon-to-be neighbors. It is featured at this site, and ours will be fairly similar. It has been completely gutted and the new walls just went up. Doug stopped by and took some pictures on his way home yesterday. This is the living room looking into the dining room (then the hallway to the kitchen):



And this is the front of the house, with fresh painting underway:



We hope Ian will enjoy growing up in this house. There are three other kids on our corner (one the same age as him), and we expect to have very friendly and interesting neighbors. We'll be just two blocks from the main Durham library, so it will be easy to get books out (and puzzles, which they also happen to lend). We'll go from having our current tiny backyard (which really belongs completely to the dogs) to having a regular yard again, and that will give him interesting new things to explore. We'll be moving in at the end of the month, and will post photos of Ian with his new house then!