So, here it is - our house:
This is the view down the street:
This is the view up (literally! note the steepness of the hill) the street:
From our front door you enter into the living room, which is long and narrow and cozy:
Immediately to my left in this pic is the door that leads to the courtyard area. (The curtain behind the TV in this pic also looks into it.) This is the view as you're standing in that doorway. You can see the stairs, door the bathroom (open), and door to a closet (red).
This little cubby hole is under the stairs. It's the place to store garbage until trashday - Wednesday mornings. We have to be sure to have it out before 6:00 a.m., but don't dare put it out the night before or the 649 neighbhorhood dogs (give or take) will make a mess of it.
This is our downstairs bathroom - just off the courtyard. I hate to be indiscreet, but you'll note the full trashcan near the toilet. That's because you can't flush the TP. Took a little while to adjust to this, but we're totally used to it now.
Here are the shower and sink in the downstairs bathroom. We usually use the upstairs shower since it has the option of using the gas-powered hot water heater. However, despiite how scary these electrical lines look, this shower does produce pretty decent hot water.
The next door in the courtyard area is for a closet that we use to store cleaning products, brooms, etc... Nothing much to see. The anatomy pic in the lower right is a handpainted/embroidered piece made years ago by one of the family members of the house's owners. There are two more as well. I think they're just about nifty and folk-arty as they can be, but they freak Rachel out a little. :)
This is another view of the courtyard. The owners left us several lovely plants, which I am doing my best to keep alive! You can see the windows on the left which lead into a small room downstairs. The arched door goes into the kitchen. The arched windows lead into the diningroom.
This is the small room downstairs off the courtyard. For now, we're not using it for anything except storage. It needs a new coat of paint, and smells of midlew to me. We're hoping to get it freshened up and be able to use it for an office / study area.
This is our dining room, which will hopefully soon have a bigger, better table and chairs. We're still deciding on what we want to get. Can't wait to have many family meals and visitors gathered around our table!
Adjoining the dining room is our kitchen - probably one of the best kitchens in all of Xela! :) Most houses don't have any built-in cabinetry, so even renters have to buy/build storage. Our kitchen is a real luxury, and we love it.
One of the curious things about life here (one of MANY) is that we don't have hot water at our kitchen faucet. One of the best purchases we've made here so far is our electric water kettle, which is SO much faster than trying to boil water on the stove at 7,500 ft elevation, and comes in super handy when we are doing dishes, making oatmeal, having a quick cup of tea, trying to sanitize something, etc. In this picture you'll also notice our baskets, perfect for storing fresh fruits and veggies from the market.
One more item of note before we leave the kitchen: the way people wash dishes here. Instead of using liquid dishsoap, they typically buy little, round containers of gritty, semi-solid soap, and just dip their sponges/rags into when they're washing the dishes. Works like a charm! Sorry about the dirty dishes in the sink, but at least you can see what our stuff looks like that we bought to use.
Time to head upstairs. The stairs are located at the opposite end of the courtyard from the kitchen. They're very steep, and very narrow. (We have to walk up sideways with our giant Gringo feet.) This is the view of the courtyard and stairs from the kitchen door. You can see all the way to clear roof, and the walkway upstairs. The door you see on the lower left goes into the livingroom.
Thisis what it looks like from the top of the stairs. You can see the bathroom door below. At the top of the stairs, you can either turn around and go up 4 more steps into the prayer room, go straight ahead into the guest room, or turn left and go down the walkway toward Rachel's room and the rest of the bedrooms. It's a very funky and small landing.
This is our prayer room. We're SUPER excited to have a place designated in our home for prayer, Bible study, worship, etc... Right now we don't have much in it, but we've decided to go 'Moroccan style' with it, and just get a bunch of nice rugs, pillows, maybe more bean bag chairs, etc. (The rug you see in there now is a hand-woven one we bought at the market last weekend.) I'm looking forward to spending many hours there, and hoping to host Bible studies there as well.
This is our guest room. Though it doesn't look inviting yet, we're hoping to be able to get a very comfy bed soon. Poco a poco (litle by little) as they say here. Another unusual blessing in this house is that each of the rooms came with an armoire. Most homes have no closets, and you have buy them. Our landlords left theirs for us to use, which saved a lot of time, money, and hassle!
This is a view down the walkway from the guest room - looking toward Rachel's door (on the right), our room (at the end of the walkway), and the little girls' room (windows on the left).
Rachel really loves her room, especially since she got a double bed instead of a twin, and has lots of storage for her things.
Next up is our room, which is pretty simple, but nice. Our bed is comfortable. The closet is roomy. And, as long as remember to duck, we don't hit our head too often on our arched "hobbit door." (Oh yeah - forgot to mention there are numerous doors and stairways we literally have to duck in so we don't injure ourselves.)
Across the hall from our room is the room the little girls share. These two are best friends, and really love being together. Thankfully, the bunk bed was already here, along with the closet and the bookshelf. All we had to do was unpack their bags and buy bedding. The windows in this picture as the same ones you saw from the walkway. They look out into the house over the courtyard. In fact, the only exterior windows in the whole house are in the prayer room, stairs, and guest room. Except for skylights, two of the bedrooms have.
Just next to the girls' room is our laundry area, neatly tucked in under the stairs to the patio. It is SUCH a blessing to have a washer and a good place to hang clothes to dry! Most people here handwash their stuff in a big sink called a pila. We have a nice pila in the courtyard, but don't use it often. Also in this picture is a gas water heater. It is kind of pain to light, but the joy of being able to have hot showers (and even baths, if we want to ) is indescribable, especially on the cold mornings we so often have here. Though the weather is much more temperate here than in Iowa, it does get down near freezing some nights, and we have no insulation, no heating system, and only wire mesh between us and the upstairs patio. A hot shower is a blessing beyond description some days.
Just to the right of the washer is our upstairs bathroom. It's pretty roomy, and very nice.
Beyond the bathroom are the stairs that lead up to the rooftop. We have to be especially careful to mind our steps and our heads here, since they are narrow, steep, and have a low overhanging ledge. Oh, and they make a corner. In the first picture the window to the right looks into the bathroom, and just to the left (behind that wall) is the washer.
At the top of the stairs you can look behind you to a platform on the roof that has a water holding tank. This is a blessing, since the water and/or electricity are often shut off here in Xela for hours at a time in one sector or another in town. You just never know when your sector is going to lose out! This holding tank has really been wonderful for those times when we'd have otherwise been without water.
Directly ahead of you at the top of the stairs is the doorway that leads to the patio. If we don't close this door and latch it (using a string and nail) each night, we're told we're likely to end up with stray cats in our house. As it is, we frequently hear them walking across the roof and skylights.
We re-oriented the rooftop patio when we moved in so that the clothes drying lines went vertically from side to side on the back half of the patio, leaving the front half free for a few chairs and tables (someday). Since we usually only wash one or two loads a day, at most, this leave us plenty of clothes drying space, and room to go up there and enjoy the view.
Speaking of the view... here it is!! It doesn't get much better than this. It's especially beautiful at night. You can see the whole city from here - everything except the volcano. OH well. We can see the three big Catholic churches in town, the Mormon Temple, and even the school where I work! (Oh, yes - and McDonalds.) We're also told that the fireworks during Christmas and New Year's Eve are unbelivable from up there. Can't wait to see them.
Well, I hope you enjoyed this little tour of our part of the world. We feel increidbly blessed to have the privilege of being here, and of sharing our home with you. Until next time...
No comments:
Post a Comment