Quarantine Family Home Tour

Normally on this blog, I tend to visit new places and post photos of them. I also go house hunting every 1-3 years, since I am a military wife, that has been our lot. Since nowadays we, like everyone else in the world, stay home all the time, I thought I would give you a tour of my house instead, or at least the interesting parts of my house. I am officially not allowed to show you the boys’ rooms. Not everyone loves to share their life on the internet. Huh. Weird..

Now this will not be a tour of an envy worthy home full of hand crafted Good Housekeeping decor. No, no. I wish. This will be true photos of a house FULL of children who have been at home for over a month. It is like summer, but with long sleeves and school work. Messiness does abound, especially in the Easter basket aftermath.

Welcome to our lovely home. Notice how the blinds on the second floor do not match. That irritates me. It does, but I have been too cheap to shell out the few hundred dollars to fix it. Plus, I prefer white. And yet, I know that the dark window blocks more more morning light, and those particular windows do happen to belong to the youngest children in the house, you know, the ones who still like to rise early, so the dark blinds are quite functional.

I also have high hopes of changing those shutters to some shade of blue this year. They are faded, and also they are brown. Bleh, brown. Other than that, we just love this house. I mean who would not love this front porch?

Notice the new wood around the garden? Alan built that the very first week of quarantine.

He did an outstanding job. That looks like quite a project. I can’t tell you much more about it. Wood craft is far outside of my areas of expertise.

We have a lovely tulip tree that is almost finish blooming now. I have always loved these. We had one at our southern Alabama house too.

This large cherry blossom tree is just beginning to bloom which means it will be gorgeous this week. That brings me so much joy. I will have to take extra time to sit on my front porch and just look at that this week.

This is all very classic quarantine, don’t you think? An Amazon package is on the doorstep, and the entire porch is covered in chalk art. They do such lovely creative things when I make them get off of video games. The pictures shown here are Daniel’s.

I just realized I still have a winter welcome mat out. Oops. The thing is I do not own a regular one to replace it…

When you enter the house, you will find yet another Amazon package, and no, they are not essential items. Well, I mean, they are as essential as a cake keeper and a new game of Sorry can be.

The very first week of quarantine I went around the main floor of the house and stuck Bible verses everywhere. I figured we were all going to need these reminders.

In the office you will find book boxes. I had to make these for silent reading time. Now that spring break is ending, I need to switch out a few of the books again. I tried to put variety in each box.

Hobby time: I do not have more free time than usual. I actually have less free time than usual by far because of managing four different school routines each day, but I still squeeze in time for my newest hobby. My whole life–okay my whole teenage plus life– I have wanted to learn to play the piano. Now I am finally doing it. I am still only in the first beginner book, but I am making progress.

My kitchen table is a symbol of another quarantine problem. Doctors can only see you for emergency type problems, so I was turned away from getting a badly needed steroid shot for my plantar fasciitis/heel spur problem. It is so bad I cannot go on any walks at all, not even short ones. Even working around the house is difficult. So my mother-in-law told me about tart cherries. I did a little research, and this is a real thing. If you have an arthritis problem you cannot shake, try eating a large amount of tart cherries each day. It may take a while, but it is supposed to help.

In our living room, you will often see our little whippet mix standing at the door, waiting to come in or out. This dog seems to go in and out about 99 times per day. Sometimes it’s annoying. And oh yeah, electronics are everywhere. We are having a few days of spring break.

Baking galore! I am still going through my Mary Berry cookbook. These are coffee cakes I made from it. Next up is a Battenberg cake. I will be sure to take a photo of it to show you when I finish it.

I finally changed out the hallway flowers to spring flowers. Once Easter hit, I realized I had left out my winter things for far too long.

The dining room has been completely taken over by Lego projects and school supplies. That room is so bad it is downright embarrassing.

Here was the kitchen table all set up for Easter morning. My oldest son stayed up late and helped me fill eggs, and I have to say, I thoroughly enjoyed that. Fourteen is full of new milestones.

You can often find a little boy in the corner of the dining room because that is where the charger is. He likes to play Mario and Minecraft.

Our kitchen still has happy birthday signs up from our March birthdays. That just dawned on me yesterday. I guess I should take those down.. These two are celebrating that I was going to make sweet potato casserole. Sweet potatoes are rock stars at our house.

And in the living room, here are the boys in their natural element, the cushy LazyBoy recliner sofa. We love that thing. I have been a hero with the youngest this week because I helped him figure out how to “make things enchanted” in Minecraft. Then I helped them friend each other so they could play Minecraft together, in each other’s worlds. They have really had a ball.

See this? This is the boys’ end table. You have the toys, the books, the charging station, and the toy box overflowing. If you think that is bad, you do not want to see the dining room (aka craft table/Lego table/ school table). I will spare you that.

Sometimes the office looks like this. The children have taken over every single room in this house.

I could not be more thankful for this backyard. On the good weather days, we can all go outside and do so many things.

I hope you enjoyed the tour! My Facebook newsfeed is full of people making jokes about quarantine and how much they are over being stuck inside. There are even one or two conspiracy theorists, but I gotta tell you, I am enjoying the at home time. Everything is cancelled! That’s like a dream come true. Because we did not lose our income, this is fun to me. I do feel terrible for those who have lost their jobs, though. That is a totally different thing. For them, I will be happy when things begin to transition back to normal, and even happier when people have work again.

How is your quarantine going?