Move Update

Hey Friends!

I’ve been getting a lot of messages asking about how our move is going so I decided to take a quick break from unpacking and give you an update!

We’ve finally moved into our new home, an 1886 Victorian in Wisconsin. The drive from North Carolina to WI was quite fun – as 4 of us ended up with the stomach bug. It was super cool. Not!

Traveling Zoo

If you follow me on social media {Instagram} and {Facebook} you will have also heard about the crazy adventures with out traveling zoo of 2 dogs, 3 hurricane Florence cats, 1 rabbit, and 1 hamster (which by the way, we’ve added another hamster back to the family since moving in…our little man’s hamster died right before we sold house #3 so we had promised him he could get another one when we moved into the new house…oiy!)

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But despite everything, we are so happy to be in our new home and having fun {well kind of} unpacking and putting things in their new locations. I must admit, I really wanted to take it one room at a time and unpack all of those boxes and have it all situated before moving on to the next room – but after 4 days in the kitchen {why do I have so many kitchen items??? I still haven’t even found the box with our normal everyday bowls – however, I’ve found my 2 (yes two!) sets of Christmas dishes already! lol} So I broke from the kitchen and decided to tackle the mud room, which became a dumping zone by the movers and us unfortunately. You can check out the mudroom before and after on Instagram.

House Improvements

Before we moved in we hired a flooring company to sand and refinish all of the wood floors in the house – they are all original and the entire house, even bedrooms, is wood floor. They weren’t in bad shape by any means, but we wanted to start out fresh and after installing, sanding, staining and polying wood floors before ourselves, we opted to have it done without any of our stuff there!

We also had the basement re-carpeted. The existing carpet didn’t have a pad and it was just glued down to the cement. There were also some slight raises and dips in the floor, so we had it leveled and bought a super super comfy carpet to go down there and had it installed. Luckily the carpet wasn’t installed until after we had arrived at the house, so I stayed up until 2am painting the baseboards before the carpet went in the next day! Currently the basement is full of boxes, so once I have it cleaned up, I’ll write an updated blog post about the basement!

The Kids & Snow

The kids had a great first day of school…and Wisconsin welcomed them with snow! Their first two days they had snowy recesses! I recorded the snowfall from our library with gorgeous stained glass windows!

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Day 2 of snowing in April I’m Wisconsin! Haha such a difference from North Carolina … although, I have heard it is snowing in Charlotte also! Glad I have this gorgeous window to watch the snow from! #victorianhomes #snow #aprilsnow #wisconsin #gatheredinthekitchen

A post shared by Stephanie Bruce (@gatheredinthekitchen) on Apr 2, 2019 at 10:37am PDT

New Friends

Yesterday afters school my house was full of kids! Three new friends came over and filled my house with laughter and shoes!! haha! I’ve always dreamed of having the “fun house” where friends would come over…mainly because then I know what is going on, who my kids are friends with – and because I will never allow anything “bad” to happen, even when they are older – and that’s my Girl Scouts honor!

I’m so very thankful for the way that all of my kids have been received at school. Everyone has been so welcoming and warmhearted – which really makes me feel good because leaving our old school was seriously beyond hard for all of us.

Food Adventures

I honestly haven’t cooked much at the house yet – however we’ve tried about 194,728 restaurants in town! haha! The little town café is seriously my favorite…I’ll tell you all more about that later as it’s worthy of it’s own post…because the original owner of our house is connected to that building!

Although I haven’t been cooking much, this morning I did make chocolate chip scones – I got a little distracted getting the kiddos’ lunches ready so they were a tad brown…but boy were they delicious!

So, so far things have been great! We truly and deeply miss our NC friends, but we are tough and have done this many times…as this is the kids 4th state and 4th house!! …this time w are here to stay! …hence why I’m going to sign off and go to an estate sale at another beautiful Queen Anne Victorian right up the street from me! …these boxes filling my house can wait!