My blue heaven...

We are porch people. The "new" house, as we are calling it, because at some point we realized that calling it the "old" house was just silly, has three porches. That's one porch for each bedroom, and one more than we have bathrooms. Okay, admittedly the third porch isn't really a porch, it's the flat roof outside our bedroom window, but we put in a sliding glass door so that we can use it like a porch.

When we were looking at siding colors I was distressed that all the "colors" available were actually beige. They had grey beige and green beige and brown beige, but the available colors were not really colors at all. So I'm made up for our boring grey siding by picking rather outrageous colors for the porch railings and doors. Hence the blue porch. I love my blue porch. The porch ceiling is blue as well, so now I'm having fantasies of painting gold stars on it.
Wow...it's amazing how housey something looks after you get a lick of paint on it. This is just the primer...there will be color on my walls! At least some of them. Actually there's color on my ceiling already (yes, it does appear to be beige, but it's not...because I would never paint something beige...it's, uhm...taupe. Yeah). I think our stairway turned out quite nicely, there is a funny blue triangle leaning against our bench (I also love our bench) which I could have moved before taking the picture...except that I didn't.
I have to slip in pictures of the baby of course. Walking and everything. I think he was walking around for approximately 3.4 seconds before he found something inappropriate to stick in his mouth, but one of the great things about getting this buttoned up is that we will have a house that is actually baby proofable to move into. No peeling paint, no splintery sills. Yippee.
Eli wanted to make sure that I talked about the basement stairway. This was the big bugaboo that slowed things down so dramatically. I could go into great detail about why we couldn't build it the way that we wanted to (flush against the wall) but suffice to say that we just couldn't, so it had to wind. Michigan stair code is quite specific about winders, and fitting it in and meeting the code was quite the pain in the butt, but now we have the grandest basement stairway you could imagine.
And here's a shot of the exterior. It looks a little "boxy" but there was no room in the budget for any exterior frills. Basically we chose quality of life (porches!) over style.

The home stretch! Here we come!