"House"lift?

How about a "house"lift instead of a facelift? Seriously, we've done some rearranging in our home lately, and folks who have been here before (including grandparents) have asked us what it looks like now, so I'm finally getting around to posting some photos. But first, a little about our home...

We live in a cement block "ranch" home. You can divide the house into two main parts: the front/public area (large, multiple use living/dining room (or some people call it a great/family room) and kitchen, and the back area with 3 smallish bedrooms, bathrooms and storage. You can enter into either area via a door off our terrace. Many consider our home on the smallish side for a family of our size, but we love it. It has a huge yard, some great shade trees, several mango trees and the location is convenient. It is quite easy for the kids and I to walk to the pool from here during the summer months or afternoons if for some reason, we don't have access to a vehicle. And that is a priority! It is also close to the studio and the mission school/compound, if we decide Tim gets to walk instead of the rest of us. We love the privacy that we have in this home (as compared to elsewhere we have lived in town: the house is situated on the back half of a large property plot and all of the windows face the sides instead of out toward the street and gates. Since there is an almost ever-present group of children at our gate/wall, watching for whatever we might do or they might see, we appreciate this little nugget of seclusion. We feel well established and safe in our neighborhood, and have many friends and acquaintances. We have also have made some significant improvements to the house (painting, storage space, tiling the terrace, electrical rewiring of some things, installing air coolers, etc.), so we aren't in a huge rush to look for a larger home. However, discovering that child #8 was on his or her way, we realized we did need to make some changes, as the bedroom where we had all five girls was already too small for the 5 of them. We weren't sure where to try and fit another child in that bedroom, if this one is another girl.

So we ended up dividing and moving the "office/playroom" from the public half of the house to the bedroom side, thus leaving space for us to "create" a bedroom for the big girls out in one corner of our living room.

The office is now in the master bedroom (giving me a place to scrapbook, if I can ever get Tim's computer stuff straightened out and put away); the playroom is in the little girls' bedroom, since they were the ones (plus Jonathan) who used those toys most of the time anyway. We've used (or are in process of) furniture, curtains and shelving to give the girls their own space that is cool and relatively private, plus we are all enjoying the new look.

The remaining three quarters of the living room/great room are now arranged as a library, a living room and a dining room.

All of this moving around of stuff allowed us to discover some clutter, things we no longer needed and instead for which we needed to find new homes, and that has enabled us to clear a few things out of the hallway that we kept there... simply 'cause we really had no other place to store it.

We are still working on several finishing touches,...

...and the pictures in this post aren't a great quality (sorry - the batteries didn't have enough "umph" to run the flash),...

...but we hope this will give those who've been asking an idea of what our home looks like, after its facelift.