House Tour

I figured it was time to document out villa here on Rakkah.  I didn't clean up before I took pictures so judge if you must.  The units are called villas and every villa is exactly the same, or just the mirror image on the other side of the street.  They are 2 stories and quite spacious.  I don't think we'd have any trouble fitting our furniture from our house in here when it arrives.  I'm sure that we'll have to downsize a little bit when we eventually move to main camp because the houses there will definitely be smaller than these.  This is the view from the front door.

 Left leads to this little entryway where we store our shoes and the kids bikes and then there's a little half bathroom at the end of the hall.  Every bathroom has a bidet as well.  Some westerners on camp use them to wash their feet when they come in from outside. We just tell the boys that some people use them to wash off, but we do not.  Can you imagine the water works if the boys started playing in the bidets?

The biggest complaint we probably have is that it's really difficult to keep the floors clean.  There is a fine dark dirt/dust that we bring in on our shoes and it sort of spreads throughout the house as the week goes on.  Everything gets dirty really fast and sweeping and mopping the entire house every few days is just so much work.  So within the first few weeks we found a great house boy named Madu.  He's from Sri Lanka, he's incredibly nice, and comes two evenings a week to clean our floors and bathrooms.   It's fantastic to not have to feel so frustrated about every little trail of dirt because I have help keeping the floors clean.

Our family room is to the right when you first walk in.  There is a TON of furniture in this house.  We eventually moved some of it to the back little storage room, or upstairs to the guest room because, who needs 12 occasion tables on one floor?  We don't.  

 This room is huge.  We probably use just about half of it.  The back half we don't really spend any time in.  When we were getting ready to move someone told us that electronics don't travel very well so it would be better to buy a new TV in kingdom.  So that's what we did.  About 2 or 3 weeks after moving in we hit up the electronics store here called Extra, and bought a nice TV.  We really like it.  Eventually we will probably get a sound system of some sort too.  Glenn's really excited about that.
If you walk straight from the front door and then turn to the left, you'll get to our kitchen and little dining room.  It's a decent space.  Lot of cupboards.  Some that we don't even use yet, but granted we don't have most of our kitchen stuff yet.

 At the back of our kitchen is a little room with another bathroom.  Some people use this as the live-in maid's room.  We put storage stuff back there for now.

 Our little laundry room is to the right, off the back of the kitchen, and connects to the back end of our family room.

From the middle of the stairs looking up to the little loft room and down to the front door.

 This is our little loft.  We have the boys toys here now and our computer desk.  To the far right is the bathroom that the boys use.

To the near right is our master bedroom.  The master bath is at the far end of the room and then around the corner to the left is our little closet.  Every closet has one shelf but no other way to store anything. Luckily, we don't have a ton of clothes with us right now.  Each room also has two dressers though, so we have plenty of space for the clothes we do have with us.  Once our shipment comes, they will remove all the Aramco furniture and we'll just have our furniture so we may have to find another storage solution at that point.
The mattresses are rock hard.  Super uncomfortable.  We took the guest room comforter and put it on top of our mattress so I have a bit more cushion.  It's still not fun to sleep on and I truly can't wait to be sleeping on my own mattress again, but we're surviving.

From the top of the stairs if you turn to the left you come to a hallway with two bedrooms off of it.  To the right is the boys room.  Two twin beds, two dressers and a little closet.

To the left, is the guest room with it's own bathroom...and a bunch of occasion tables at the moment.  Eventually, once our shipment comes, the guest room will be the boys room with their bunk beds, and the room they're in will be the nursery.

Here's another view from the corner of the loft looking into the guest room and master.

It's a nice little place.  The craftsmanship is obviously not US standards, but it's got plenty of space, no bugs, and great A/C so all in all, we're pretty comfortable here.  I'm excited for our shipment to come so we can get even more settled with our own things.