Tramonte Nearing Completion

We have been in our new house for over a month now, and we're still not done "moving in".  Now I'm not quite sure what the generally accepted standard is for time to get your house situated, but we have got to be behind schedule at best.  Part of this we can blame on paying extreme attention to detail, part can be blamed on continued entertainment for a 2 & 4 year old, and part of it can certainly be blamed on good ol' procrastination.  In any event, we are very pleased with the parts of the house that are now finalized with paint, furniture, and those other personal touches that make a house a home.

I will have to give special props to Angel's design ability.  I think we have the next candidate for Design Star on our hands.  Everything that she dreams up seems to come to fruition in an awesome room that receives numerous compliments from our guests.  Now, in the last house we had the built-in.  I like to think that it was my handiwork that made it awesome, but the workmanship was pretty shoddy even if it did take me 2 months to finish.  Making function out of an empty space was the real magic. 

This special skill is certainly apparent in Angel's latest creation in our new abode.  Our game room upstairs has lots of space, which is perfect since we have lots of kiddie stuff in the way of toys, crafts, games, books, etc.  The functional needs of this room really began to hit me as I have watched Jackson and Emily trying to post colorings of Spiderman up on the walls with scotch tape (clearly Angel knows a thing or two about kids :) )

What you see in the picture above is a black portion of the wall that has been made into a chalkboard.  It gets even better as the magnetic primer allows the kids to put magnets directly on the black area.  A friend at work pointed out that the challenge now will be making sure that the boundary is clearly understood by our aspiring artists.  "No, don't draw on mommy & daddy's bedroom walls!"

The organization bins provide for an orderly configuration of everything from coloring books to fake food.  I think Angel used the dewey decimal system combined with her own color coding scheme to get the rules in place.  The 4 foot hardwood strip provides a nice place to stand an easel, put together a puzzle, or lay down a race track.  Finally, the sheet metal strip provides an additional space to post up the kids' work for all to see.

Right next to the play room you'll find my favorite spot in the house: the media room.  I like to use the term media room since home theatre leans too heavily on the movie function of the room.  Currently, the HD projector has logged more hours displaying Spiderman taking down bad guys on the Wii than it has showing movies.  We did get to watch some of Michael Phelps awesome heats in the newly configured retreat. 

Wrapping up my thoughts quickly, here is a shot of the kids playing on the built in desks (won't be whitewashed like that for long :) ) and the front of the house. 

Well, that is it for this post.  Going to get the kids to bed...