O Man What a Life!: Not your "Southern Living" home

House pictures! Here are a few shots to show my mom (and you reader friend) what our home here looks like. Be forewarned, this is NOT your next Southern Living magazine home.

Here it is! The whole yard is enclosed by a 9 foot high wall, which affords us great privacy. This is the view from the front gate.

Love that tile? good! it is EVERYWHERE in this house.

Fun cultural factoid: the stairs on the right lead to a room locally known as the Mejlis. Guests typically enter through this door and don't see other parts of your house.

Our formal living/dinning space. We don't use all of the rooms exactly as a local family would because we don't have the same needs. In most homes, this would be a private room for family.

Here is the view from the front door.

And now looking into the hallway. The door on the left is the master bedroom and through the hallway straight ahead we'll find the kitchen and the Mejlis. The stairs just go straight to the roof; they are only utilized when a repairman has to tinker with the compressors for the A/Cs.

See, I told you that tile wouldn't disappoint!

So here is our mejlis... not exactly fit for receiving guests (we use the other rooms for entertaining obviously). We use it to dry laundry right now.

My pink kitchen. You can check out a recent post for more detailed kitchen tour.

Here's the master bedroom.

One interesting thing to adjust to is that there are no closets. No clothes closet, no broom closet, and no linen closet. The gigantic wardrobes that serve this purpose are assembled in the room - and I can't imagine the headache of getting it out if you had to move! We actually bought this set from the previous residents so there was no moving or assembly required.

Master bathroom/Laundry room. Same tile as the kitchen only blue instead of pink. Believe it or not, this is actually one of my favorite rooms color scheme wise. I think its the yellow shower curtain I brought from TJ Maxx. $5 well spent!! (sorry the picture doesn't show it well)

Mirror art, marbled sink and purchased shelving to make it functional.

Guest bedroom. We are ready to host whenever you're ready to visit!

And finally, the office/family room/gym space I creatively call "the red room." Inspired by our love of our college and favorite football team, I knew we needed a special place to spend our first fall away from Bryant-Denny stadium. It's a little crazy, but hey, why not?

Another view of the couch, and no, we did not custom order this couch. It was sitting in the showroom like this and happened to measure perfectly for our room. Someday I will do a whole post on couch shopping here and you'll believe me that this actually looked tame.

We recently had the opportunity to purchase a new couch set from a family leaving the area, so we actually will be changing to a normal, western-style couch set soon (read: "normal American-looking", not "cowboy").