Around the House

Well I'm stuck in the house with these sick little ducklings, so I snapped a few photos of some different things about housing in Spain.  I don't think its necessarily exclusive to Spain but its just a little different than life in the good ol' Southern states of the US.

This is our dish rack, its actually built into the cabinets here in most apartments.  Super convenient and keeps stuff off the counters.  Most folks also use it to store their dishes a well.  One stop shopping dry AND store!  

Notice the SUPER dark "blinds" these are roll down  black out curtains that cover the outside of all of our windows and patio doors.  They are AWESOME and needed since it stays daylight here until 11PM in the summer!  When we want light we just roll them up and VOILA want it dark, for say... the girls bedtime or wanting them to sleep past sunrise...roll them down and BAM darkness. 

Our front door has a spider lock system...steel beams go in all directions through the door frame when locked.  Jeremy is  a big fan of this security feature, we had something similar on our door in Peru but it was exposed on the backside of the door, this system is all internal.  It also has the classic European knob on the center of the door (which Karis asks why its there almost every time we come in the door)

The bidet- also not exclusive to Spain however the girls were FASCINATED by it...Karis called it the "little sink" for awhile.  We turned the water off to it, so now the girls hardly pay attention to it. 

The "laundry room".  Typically the washing machine is outside on a little closed off "terrace off the kitchen" or its located in the kitchen.  Our landlords put in the washing machine for us as part of our rent (such a blessing) however she literally put the smallest washer you can buy here in (it fits 4 towels in it if I cram them in).  We also totally splurged and bought a dryer that we caught on sale.  Its super dry in the summer (clothes dry on the line in like 1 hour) but during the winter it takes almost 2 days because we get no  direct sun where our apartment is in the apartment complex and hanging up the clothes inside our apartment was a disaster, the girls were CONSTANTLY knocking clothes off {sometimes intentionally but most of the time it was accidentally} so it still was a struggle for me with all the laundry these very ACTIVE little girls create.  I was trying to make it work but Jeremy said that for my sanity it needed to move from the "want" to the "need" list.  However, I still try to line dry most of our clothes because using the dryer really bumps up the power bill and utilities here are expensive.