A Place to Call Home

On Friday the 22nd Trevor and I stayed up all morning to be on UK hours in order to hear back from the letting agency as to whether or not we got the house we had been looking at.  And...We have a home! In a month our new address will be...

2 Middle St, Worcester, WR1 1NQ, UK

"Our home", it feels good to say that again.  While, I am very appreciative to all those family members that have allowed us to invade their homes this summer, and bum off their food...I miss having ONE home.  I miss the familiarity off having one bed to fall asleep in every night...and one familiar room to wake up in, a room that does not startle me out of dreams confused and asking the question
"Who's home is this".  It can be a very odd and insecure feeling.


Not to mention Trevor and I have been living in Basements pretty much all of are lives.  We both grew up with rooms in the basement, and then when we went UWRF  the only sufficient apartment we could get and afford, was the basement of someones home.  Oh...yes...we shared someone else's home and lived in their basement for 2-3 years.  So this time around, anything that wasn't a basement as long as we could afford it was sufficient enough for us...and the house we chose is not perfect, it has quirks but it doesn't matter because those little flaws make it a home.


So let us introduce you to the Kohls/Tomesh's new home...

We are the Middle Blue door.  This is a very characteristically English home...it's terraced (connected in a row with other homes much like it) 2 Bedrooms, 1 Bathroom and 1/2 Bath, Kitchen, Lounge, and a Garden.

First of all...while the house is part furnished, DON'T worry, that isn't our purple furniture!  lol.  All funny business aside, the Living Room (Lounge) has always been one of my favorite rooms in a home...it's always comfy, and inviting.  You can have guests in your living room, or you can just cuddle up with your family on the sofa in front of the t.v., or a nice warm fireplace...now that we have one. 

Our little Kitchen...yup...it's little, but I will tell you a secret...."Pssst....I can't cook!".  Most of my meals require 5 or less ingredients...so as long as I can fit five or less ingredients on the counter it looks like I am set!  Oh...and I know what you are looking at in the left hand bottom corner....and it's exactly what you thought it was...A WASHING MACHINE?!?!  Apparently this is a pretty common thing in the UK.  But we will get back to this later.  Do you see that door all the way to the end of the hallway in the picture...It's a..............................................................................................

1/2 BATH  (I mean excuse me a Cloakroom)!!!!!!   IN THE KITCHEN!!!! NEXT TO WHERE I COOK!!!!  lol....okay odd choice of places to put the Loo, but at least there is an extra toilet on the bottom floor, there will just have to be rules against what type of excretion can be done while there is food being prepared.  

Remember when I said we would get back to the fact that the English put their Washing Machines in the Kitchen?  Well, you will never believe me when I tell you where they put their dryers!  Yup...you are looking at it....it's a clothes line....one of those old fashioned things you might have seen at your grandmas house when you were much, much younger!  Yes...this will be different, however, a lot of money in energy expenses will be saved, and a little more environmentally conscious. 

But in all seriousness...what a lovely English garden.  This is the window overlooking the garden.  It will be so nice to have our little private separate space of outside.  The gardens in England often are some sort of stone, rather then just grass...this makes them more easily maintainable.  Except for weeds as you can see.

I wish I had a better image of the garden that shows more of the space, but you will just have to wait until we get there for updated pictures with our decorative changes. 

Pictured are Trevor's friends/colleagues from the UK who were gracious enough to go on this home viewing for us, pick out this home for us, oh and take these pictures for us!  (FYI a troop of 4 people went to view this house...either the person that showed the house was intimidated, or impressed, I am not yet sure which one).  This is the master bedroom...not ridiculously large but still spacious and comfy...and very nice to know we will have a bed to crash in after an 8 hour flight into London, and then a 5 hour rail ride to get us into Worcester...and then the remaining 0.2 mile luggage haul from the rail station to our home!  Taxi!

The office, and or 2nd BEDROOM, for those of you who plan to be guests at our house.  However I am not sure if this will be the office for long....I have a feeling I may be switching it with the Master bedroom because the Bathroom is attached to this room.  As I am told...both of these rooms should be similar sizes so it just may work.  

The highlight of the home...in my opinion.  I could not live without my bubble bath!  Trevor and I have sacrificed this in our previous homes...and never again...welcome back to your rightful place bathtub. 

So this is our home....I hope you have enjoyed the tour.  We will post more pictures once we get there and put our creative touches on it.

If you are reading this...this is a PERFECT TIME to subscribe to our blog...I may make it private to only those who read the blog soon...so make sure you do not miss out because you haven't subscribed. 

The “Other” English Language

Okay, maybe I am thinking a little too much ahead of myself, but I have been searching Amazon and Ebay UK to find house supplies that we might need when we get there (even though we are still home searching). However, there has been a big challenge to this...many times different words are used for the same item in the U.S.

Examples...

U.S.                                                        U.K.

Comforter                                              Duvet

Dish Sets                                                Dinning Sets

Queen Mattress                                     King Mattress

King Mattress                                        Super King Mattress

Box Spring                                            Does not exist- If it is found it's 

                                                              referred to as USA Style

*This is because the box springs are usually implemented into the bed frames.

Bathroom                                              Bathroom-Indicative of a Bath

Bathroom                                              Shower Room-Indicative of a Shower

½ Bath                                                  Toilet

Backyard                                              Garden

*These ones have been really confusing while searching for a home.

I can tell this will be a little bit of a learning experience for me. I never anticipated having so many words with slight differentiations from American English.  I am kind of embarrassed, because I did end up bookmarking “www.translatebritish.com” to avoid confusion. I am working very hard to be aware of my speech by keeping tabs on the thick Wisconsin accent, which has included doing my best to enunciate and learning to find other words to describe similar things. In fact, I started doing this as a result of my University thinking my last name was P-E-R-I-O-D, because when quoting them my email address jessica.ann.kohls@gmail.com they did not understand what period meant...so I have used full stop, and dot, to try to replace period, since I really do not want period to be my last name!

In other news, we are currently waiting on a bank statement we get the end of July to finish filling out our Visa Application, once this is submitted we have to get our biometric details taken, and when we finally get our Visa we can book our flights (which can only be after August 19^th because you can only arrive 1 month before your course work starts). While we are doing this we are looking for a home...which has proved rather difficult. Maybe we are being spoiled Americans but we want a home that has a bathroom (aka a bath), 1-2 bedrooms, enclosed rear garden (aka backyard), and the one thing we are absolutely unwilling to sacrifice, which is a pet friendly property, so we can finally get our dog. We would like to get a home right away so we can settle in immediately, and do not have to live in a dorm, or a hotel, it is just too much additional stress. So, wish us luck!