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Big news: we bought a house!  A real house-house, with real walls, real stairs, and a real grass yard for growing tomatoes and climbing beans.  A house with two floors, waiting to be filled with laughter and memories.  Our new neighborhood has a lovely young family appeal to it, and we can't wait to put down roots in this new community.  It's overwhelming, exciting, and we hope in the end it'll prove to be the right decision.

That all being said, the next few months of our life will be a cyclone of tasks, moving boxes, and getting things done.  We'll be living out of another home, moving most of our stuff to a different home, getting our current home ready to sell, and envisioning life in our new home.  I'm not sure how often I'll be able blog, but it'll certainly be on my mind, and I'll do my best to check in every once in a while.

As part of the moving process, a staging consultant visited our apartment to advise us on how best to set-up our space to sell.  She gave us some great advice that I wanted to remember (for our new home) and share with all of you:

• Set-up each room according to the function that it serves.  Creating physical / visual room separators help define the space; say, adding a floor rug to a den identifies that area as a separate room.  This is especially important when working with open concept areas like our own.
• If your space is naturally dark, as ours is (due to a lack of natural light), go easy on the heavy wood furniture and dark colours.  Choose light or transparent colours when decorating and selecting furniture.  Consider lighting fixtures that have multiple bulbs.
• Wall art should be placed appropriately, so that it is relative to the arrangement below it.  We had a giant painting above our sofa that was hung too high, such that the two together didn't look like one well-connected space.  We were recommended to move the painting just 6" above the sofa.

We will dearly miss our apartment (seriously... our sweet daughter was born here!), but hey, it's always hard to let go of such a big piece of your past.  We're ready to start a new chapter in our life, in a new place, and are focusing efforts on a bright future ahead.

Onward ho.