03 November 2010

The Latest Hampton House (Part 1)

I wonder how many of these posts I will have during my life. We've had the Surabaya house, the Vancouver house and now the Bangkok house. It's sort of fun to see how different each place is and I think of all the places we have lived this is probably my favorite. Of course I wish it has just one extra bedroom (so the printer could move off of the kitchen counter) but it's definitely a big step up from the flood-prone, rat-filled house we had in Indonesia.

This will be a multi-part series most likely completed as I get around to cleaning parts of the house.

Here's our laundry room.


It's actually a separate little house with two bedrooms meant to house a maid. We just keep all of our suitcases out there. It also contains 40 years worth of our colleagues belongings that they left behind. My new washer lives out here.


Our backyard is pretty much just our clothesline. It's actually a great clothesline, it gets sun in the mornings for a few hours and during hot season I can get a pair of blue jeans dry in about 20 minutes.


Now I have heard lots of people discussing how "green" it is to have a clothesline and how they just absolutely love to hang out their clothes. But really, when it's all you have it's not always so fun. Here's a quote from my friend Ginger (I hope she doesn't mind), but it pretty much sums up how I feel about it:

"And maybe I am wrong, really wrong, and if so folks please forgive me...but I'm thinking people only love hanging clothes out when it is an 'option' and not a necessity? Maybe not?"

Amen, Ginger, Amen!

I think she is exactly right, clotheslines are only fun when you have a dryer to back you up. I can't tell you how many days during rainy season I have let clothes hang all day long and not dry. Or I hang them up and go somewhere and it rains. Still infinitely better than our set-up in Indonesia. Bangkok always has that going for it.


Anyway, we also have some beautiful gas tanks to liven up the space.

Here's our back door and our Asher.


This is our dining room. I love having a big table. This is the first time we've had more than four chairs (and space for more than four chairs). It's much easier to have people over for dinner when you have place for them to sit.


Looking from the eating area to the living room.


Asher's table and chairs. He loves his little table, but he can't stand to have the little covers on the backs of the chairs.


The living room and our massive couch with Asher sprawled out watching Bolt. We live in Asia and we have a comfortable couch. It is possible.


The other side of the living room.


Our Craig's list chair and Asher's toys, he gets the bottom half of the bookshelf, we get the top half.


Finally, the time out corner. Asher has to sit in his chair facing the door. Under the stairs is where we store all of the stuff that would go in an office. And our shoes. And Asher's bike. And some other junk. That door goes to our bathroom. I didn't get that far in my cleaning, so no pictures yet.


I hope you enjoyed the first part of our tour. We still have the kitchen, the bathroom and our bedrooms to go.

4 comments:

Brittney said...

I love the pictures of your place - thanks so much for sharing them. And you are very right. . .I only like hanging clothes because after the day ends, if they are still wet, I can put them in the drying instead of having them soaking wet through the night or after a rain storm. And on days where I was crazy pregnant and it was too hot, I just put them in my dryer instead of sweating my face off(though I cringed because of the energy I was using). I can't imagine having to do it for every load. Thanks for your perseverance as a Momma to serve your family and clean their dirty clothes!!! Lots of work!!!

Anthony and Sharon said...

I'm with you on the clothesline. Though, we were fortunate enough to buy a dryer our 2nd week overseas. We used it often the first 2 years or so, but when we moved to the kampung, there was no place for it...so it became counterspace far away from any plug (and any open door bc it makes any room super hot bc it doesn't have a exhaust tube, so just fills hotness up everywhere)...
For cloth diapers though they are a life saver! Sunshine is better than bleach most days. Like Jesus' magic eraser for poop stains. And dryers just wear the cloth diapers out...so you wouldn't want one anyway.

To add to this very long comment :) Can you not just chunk all that left-behind stuff? Junk is a huge pet-peeve of mine! If you want, I can come visit you and when you go to bed I will make all of it disappear. Then we can clean it out, tidy it up a bit and make Asher an awesome play room... just an offer. Lemme know.

Thanks for the tour so far of the house! Hope I see it in person in the near future!:)

roger and courtney said...

Sharon,
I wish we could just throw it all away, but this house and the one connected to it are furnished houses, so all the stuff has to come back inside when we leave. I have (after 9 months) managed to get most of the stuff out that is not ours, but probably half the kitchen cabinets are filled with stuff that is not mine. My big project before the baby comes is to get some more boxes and get it all out of the cabinets and into the maid's house.
I hope you get to see our house in person, but hopefully we will get to move to a Thai neighborhood soon. We love our house, but we are so ready to move into a neighborhood full of the people we are here to reach.

Mark and Beth said...

i still can't view the pics for this post. i've tried on multiple occasions but it says under maintenance. not sure why. pics in your other posts are visible. wonder if anyone else has had this problem?