What keeps me from crafting? part 1

You want to know what keeps me from doing what I really love doing?  I'm going to take a leap and just assume that you really REALLY wanted to know.  

It doesn't completely make sense to me.  In reality, I have more free time in the summer than any other time of year.  But that free time gets spent doing...other things.  Things like....

HOUSE HUNTING:

I mentioned before that we're looking to move either into a less expensive home or one with a bigger yard.....or BOTH.  Well, the first home we looked at was cheaper AND had a much larger yard.  Unfortunately, someone beat us to it.  Grrrr....  The next house was HUGE!  I'm talking biggest place I've ever lived, more rooms than I know what to do with HUGE!  When we called to say we were interested, we found out it had been taken-taken even before we had looked at the place.  Would have been nice to know before we fell in love with the place.  I was heart broken.

So we're going with the simple, practical home.  The home that's just down the street from us.  It's $250 less a month, smaller living space, but super large unfinished basement.  The backyard is super small (as are most yards in this neighborhood) but opens to a large field...no fence or run down tennis court blocking our views.

This is the side yard.  Yep-almost nonexistent.  Almost to the level of ridiculous.

  

This is part of that field.  Yep, I'm looking down from the deck and already, my future yard ends.  No worries, I checked with our guy and asked about putting our pool there.  He seems to think it'll be okay, so that's good enough for me.  My kids are so excited about finally being able to put up our pool.  We bought it right before we moved to Wyoming but haven't been able to put it up due to our incredibly small yard.  

Not all grass is lost.  See, I've got about a 5xsomething yard in the back I can mow.  Might take me 5 minutes, but I'll just be grateful that we are saving $250/month and we still have space to put up the pool.  

I want you to keep in mind that we haven't moved in yet.  All this stuff is somebody else's.  BUT, it's been fun visualizing with my hubs about how we'll use the space.  We're thinking of a craft area, storage space, and a place to play video games.

Yes!  Built in storage for all my crafting needs.  My husband sees this as food storage, but I'm pretty sure I can easily win this one!

I'm stressing just a teeny bit about where to place my furniture.  However, knowing we have that large basement really does help.

The living room is a bit smaller than what we have currently, but I think if we used the space wisely, we can make it work to our advantage.

I'm guessing the current tenants love animals?  

Another downside---carpet in the dining room.  Who puts carpet in a dining room?!!  

Now, I want you to know not everything is negative about this place.  I actually have a better laundry area in this new home.  My current home has a place for w/d hookup put NO shelves.  None.  The new home has cabinets and shelves.  I never knew I could be so excited about laundry storage space.

Please excuse the fuzzy pictures.  It's a small kitchen (my current one is much prettier) but it has more cabinets meaning I'll actually have ROOM to put things away.

No bedroom shots in this post, I apologize.  

This isn't the dream home, but hopefully with the money we are saving and with the eventual sale of our Idaho home, we will be able to buy that amazing home.  I'm hoping the sacrifices we're willing to make now will lead to good things in the future.  Besides, it's only a 1-year commitment.  

It feels good to save money!