Wednesday, November 3, 2010

Grandma´s Apartment

Welcome to our house! Well, it´s got some work to do and we won´t be living there until after we get married but here it is. It is a large apartment on the second floor (that would be 3rd in the US) right next to where Gabriel lives now, with his mom. It used to be his grandma´s apartment but since she died (when Gabriel was in his early teens) it has been used as a rental. For the past year or two it has been empty now. Within the next year we will be doing some work and buying new furniture. . . so here are the ´before´pictures. Please enter: Here´s our front door with the stairway to the left and on the right you can just see Tomasa´s front door.
The first room on your left when you enter is the kitchen which opens up a large enclosed patio. Right now the kitchen does not look anything like this. This past Sat., with the help of Jose (bro.in.law) Gabriel took out all the cabinets etc. and tore down all the tiles. We are planning on re-doing the pipes and tiles, probably going to tear down a wall were the table is, taking out the pantry to have a bigger room. Then we will make a u-shaped kitchen. We are currently playing with the kitchen-planner on ikea seeing what we like.

Here is the enclosed patio. The table you see here we hope to refurbish (Rosa, Gabriel´s sis, is pro at this kind of stuff) and use for our ¨formal¨dining room which will be in our living room.


Here is our spacious living room. We will be living in central Valdepeñas. Those two windows open up to the corner of the two main streets here, Calle 6 de Junio and Avnda 1 de Julio. We kind of rearranged the furniture that´s here to form what we hope to buy. The table will go where the table is, a couch with seperable foot stool will go where Gabriel is lounging, and the t.v. and cabinetes will go on the wall in front.

Turning the corner from the hallway you first enter into the aptment we have a real long hallway with four bedrooms and two baths. You can see the small bathroom at the end of the hall.

First bedroom: this will be made into a study/office type room. That means basically we´ll put the computer there. :)

This is the main bathroom. As you can see some tiles already started to fall when Gabriel was doing some work here. So we are going to re-do the pipes and tiles here too. Plus, change some fixtures which the nice discount Gabriel gets at his work.

This will be the master bedroom. We will buy new furniture for this room.

This room will be our "antique" guest room. The chairs plus a dresser with wash basin plus some other antique furniture will be put here. Most of the furniture in the house is like this: really old.
Here is the 4th room which is currently being used as a storage room for junk. . . that will have to be cleaned out :) So, as you can see if you plan to visit us we will have plenty of space for you to crash.

The end of the hall: a small bathroom. This will also be torn apart. The glass "shower curtain" (mampara in Spanish, I´m leaning words I don´t even know in english;) Gabriel just put in before we decide it best to redo the walls and pipes on all the bathrooms and kitchen, so he´ll have to take that down again.
Well, there you have it. I´ll have to take a picture from the outside and I have some kitchen in destruction pics too. :) I´ll keep you all updated on our work and the progress of our house!

Tuesday, November 2, 2010

Birthday Weekend

The weekend of my birthday (Oct. 22) Gabriel, his mom, and I drove down to Almería to visit his sister and family and to celebrate with Rosa who turned 2 on the 23rd. We had a great time. Thanks family and friends for all the birthday wishes, cards, and gifts! They were very appreciated.
These were the options we had so the 2 is for Rosa and the 24 plus 1 is for me :) It is a soy cake made for the both of us who share the same allergy to milk. How nice that we have close birthdays, huh?!

Then, in the afternoon we went to Monsel a beach in the Cabo de Gato. Gabriel and I enjoyed some bouldering.

Even, Marta got into and wanted to climb!



Tomasa, MariCarmen, and Rosa
Jose and MariCarmen bringing the girls up the rock.


On top! It´s a beautiful beach with lots of crazy rock formations due to the lava rock and winds


At the house looking at the family pet, whose name is Spider. They feed it small crickets. We tried to feed it some flies but it wasn´t at all interested. . . try giving dog food to a dog after you´ve been feeding it steak. . . I suppose it´s the same reason. :)