Our House in Oaxaca

A few of you have expressed interest in our rental house…so in the next few postings, I’ll try to describe it and upload photos onto the blog. The house looks very plain from the street and in fact, it is a simple set up. To us it feels just right, with enough furnishings and appliances to make our life here pleasant and comfortable. The home is in a middle class neighborhood. Its walls on both sides are the walls of our neighbor’s homes (I can hear clearly when their doorbell rings or when the gradkids are visiting). This is not so unusual for Mexico…especially in the colonial districts of town. Here is pictured the view from the street…Calle Manuel M. Dieguez…two blocks “arriba” up from Gigante (Giant…the large grocery store where we often shop).

The house is two stories, a rectangular block, five bedrooms and two full baths. On the bottom floor, the entry way (previous owner used it as a garage…our kids use it to play with their super balls) opens into the living room. This is a large rectangle, with window, two couches, television, desk and a few bookcases. We live in this room quite a lot. Walk down the hallway to the dining area and kitchen…there are three more bedrooms on this floor, the back bedroom is Abby’s. She’s the only one sleeping on the first floor. Another bedroom is Jason’s prayer room. The final room is currently the music room. We keep my violin and Gabe’s guitar in there, as well as all our sports equipment. It’s very nice to have all that extra space. Makes me wish our house in Berkeley was a bit bigger, though if it were, we’d probably feel compelled to rent out a room. The downstairs bath is attached to the music room.

We bought a comfortable sitting chair (from a local craftsman) for the prayer room in which Jason can sit and pray or read. The only other piece of furniture we replaced was a futon mattress in the living room. The previous mattress was awful. The current…as you see Jason sitting on it in the living room photo…is thick and wonderful.

There are five other curious spaces on the ground floor. One is a small room, with a washing machine. The other is a utility room with cleaning supplies and an ironing board. The other two spaces are open to the sky…almost like little patios, but walled in by neighbor's house or ours. One of those spaces contains the water pump and the washing sink (the ridged sink to which I referred in the “Uniforms” posting)…the other patio has a plastic roof over part of it…we can hang laundry under this roof if it rains on laundry day.

I’ll post about the second floor and roof tomorrow.