Moving to a new neighborhood

So, you move into a new neighborhood. Now you need to set into the new area for a look around. Walking around the neighborhood is always a good way to get to know better your surroundings.

Visiting your neighbors to  introduce yourself is not a bad idea, you don't have to wait for them to give you the welcome, you can visit them, introduce yourself and let them know you're there in case they need you.
TIP: When introducing yourself is always a nice gesture to bring a gift, could be a dish or a bottle of wine, or even something made by yuorself, they will apreciate it.


This is our new neighborhood.

We moved to Valrico which is an area that in general we know pretty well and is not too far from our previous location in Brandon.

And now we present... the curtains

Curtains were necessary on this sliding door, not only for privacy purposes, but also to give some zest to this bare wall.

There's Ella!

Then I found a pair of curtains at Ikea, with illustrations of birds and trees, and immediately fell in love with them. I like that they're fun and graphic. But then we realized we were going to need more color, we wanted something that could make more contrast but we didn't want a very strong color, so we went back and bought a pair of plain green curtains and they went very well with one of the toss pillow on the sofa.

Oh! By the way, those green curtains wrinkle just by looking at them!

Of course, we kept in mind the living room colors when we bought the curtains, we didn't want to have a color carnival.

And there they are, we combined both curtains thanks to my mom's idea supported by Ramon.

Creating the reading habit

I really love the fact that Ella loves books. Since she doesn't know how to read yet, she asks us to read the stories for her. She has learned the different letters sounds and is able to read many words already. We're very proud of her, she just turned four and is already reading words! 

Some books that have helped her are Dr. Seuss books, which are her favorites.

Dr.Seuss is Ella's favorite author.

We go to the library and book stores with her very frequently, we love the environment. And there, surrounded by books we read and read untill we're tired. Is incredible how many words she knows already.

Nature in our home

Last winter we had in our apartment this bowl with rocks and pinecones that Ella and I picked up ourselves, combined with potpourri. I loved the colors!



The best thing is that I only had to buy the potpourri (which wasn't expensive).

Today I wanted to put something in the center of the dining table. I resolved to cut a branch of the bushes of our pathway, they needed triming anyway.

Then I combined the branch with my only fake folwer to give it a little touch of green.

You can use seashells, leaves, sand, branches with no leaves, cut flowers, whatever you can find, and arrange them in any vase or bowl you find at home. Is an unexpensive way to decorate using natural elements.

The dininng room

The dining room is important (like the kitchen) because is related with food, so it was one of the first rooms to be finished. Here's a picture of the dining room before:

Maybe you noticed that the previous owner had the same dining set we have.

We didn't know what to do with that wall nook on the right, but then Ramon's light bulb went on. He had the idea of sticking there the tree wall decal he gave me as a present a long time ago.

The dining room nook.

Here's what we have done so far. But the problem with this huge wall remains. We will have to make an extremely large art or gather a bunch of small ones we have around the house, we'll see what happens. For now it will stay like this.