Slowly but surely we are making progress on the house. When you rent a home in UAE it literally comes with nothing inside despite paying an exorbitant amount of money in rent. We as tenants are expected to furnish our own refrigerator, stove, dishwasher, all window coverings, light fixtures (you only get a light socket hanging out of the ceiling), and we had to pay to rekey all the locks just to name a few things. So getting the house put together is a very time consuming task and the costs begin to add up quickly.
We have been working every weekend on the house whether it's shopping for the things we need or installing the items. Shopping can be quite a chore in Dubai with stores spread all over the city. There isn't a one-stop-shop like Walmart or Target to pick up all the little things you need in a home. Everything is at a mall and because everything is at the mall, everyone is at the mall, which means getting to the mall and parking at the mall can wear you out before you even begin shopping. Despite the challenges, we are pretty fortunate to have some good stores here like Pottery Barn, Pottery Barn Kids, Crate and Barrel, Ace Hardware, Ikea, and soon a Williams and Sonoma!
There are also souks (individually owned stores where you can bargin on price) for everything from gold to plants. Last weekend we decided to find the plant souks which we heard you can get plants for dirt cheap and not only did we discover souk after souk of beautiful plants and trees, we could not believe how much cheaper the prices were. I bought a three foot high indoor houseplant at Ace for 129 dhs (around $35) that wasn't even in a fancy pot; just the standard black plastic pot plants come in. The next day we discovered the plant souk and we bought 2 gardenia plants, 2 huge honeysuckle vines, 8 ivy plants, 1 golden pothos indoor plant, 2 large terra cotta pots, 2 huge white pots with saucers, 2 large bags of potting soil, 2 individual saucers that I needed for other pots, and we paid 260 dirhams (around $70). I could not believe the difference.
For the past 2.5 weeks we've had a gardening company here redoing our backyard. The previous tenants never once watered the yard and all the grass, trees, and plants had died. The backyard had been dug up by their dog and it was such a mess that I wouldn't let the boys outside to play. Of course this transformation is on our dime, but it's something we feel is worth it since our boys and Bella like to spend so much time outside. Last week the gardeners installed our sod and today they are planting the flower beds. On Wednesday Toys-R-Us arrives with the new cedar wood swing set/playscape we bought for the boys. They are going to love it! It has swings, a glider, huge slide, rock wall that leads up to a fort, and a sandbox area under the fort. Artem keeps asking when the new "playground" is going to get here. I'll be sure to post pictures once we get everything in the yard finished. You will not believe the difference from the old gross yard.
I know I promised pictures of our house so here are a few of the rooms downstairs that are semi-complete and I'm willing to share. If you are a visual person like me, here is the floor plan to our house so you can get an idea of the rooms I'm showing you.
First stop on our picture tour is our entry way, come on in! The door on the left goes to our home gym and only downstairs bedroom with full bath. You are not allowed to see that room at this time because although techncially it contains our gym equipment, it's unusable due to it currently housing an old couch and bed that we need to get rid of.
This is our family room/dining room combination. Notice the lovely bare lightbulbs hanging down from the ceiling. Light fixtures are the tenants responsibility and I haven't found any yet that I like in our budget. When tentants move out they take their light fixtures with them. I'm not joking, we'll sell our's before we move back home. If you look through the back windows you can see the dead backyard.
And here is our family room/dining room after we received our household goods shipment, got the vertical blinds and curtains installed, and hung some pictures. Hanging pictures here, well hanging anything here, is a MAJOR task. They don't build with wood and drywall here, they build with slump block and mortar so the walls are cement which presents a lovely challenge to deal with when hanging anything.
One of the reasons I wanted this floorplan so badly is the kitchen and eat-in breakfast area. I love how big it is, the layout, and the windows over the sink that look out to the backyard. This is our kitchen before; no refrigerator, stove, or dishwasher.
Our kitchen after with wood blinds, valances, a solid butcher block center island, and all the appliances.
I love that I can look out the kitchen window and watch the boys play. See the new grass going in? That's where the "playground" will go.
Eat-in breakfast area. In a couple of months that table will move upstairs to our home classroom and if I play my cards right, a new table from Pottery Barn that I've had my eye on will make this spot it's home.
Look what I found at a tabletop sale here in Dubai!! A framed picture of "Old Glory". As soon as I saw it, I started tearing up and I had to have it right away. I love the touch of home in our house in Dubai. By the way, a tabletop sale in Dubai is not a bunch of people getting together to sell the tops of their tables. It's what we call a craft fair in the states. Anyone could make that mistake right?
You are going to think I'm crazy but I had to show you pictures of my walk-in pantry. There is very little storage in homes here in UAE. Most homes don't have built in closets (they call them wardrobes here) and people have to buy hutch type cabinets to store things in. So to have a pantry, let alone a walk-in pantry is very rare. We bought these storage shelves and assembled them ourselves, over 128 nuts and bolts we had to screw together, but who's counting, and now my little Type A personality is in hog heaven with all of this organized storage.
On to something more fun...the playroom/office. It's in the back corner of the house so I can keep toys tucked away and out of sight and has sliding glass doors that lead out to a second back patio.
We bought large interlocking rubber mats from Ace Hardware that look like wood flooring. Perfect for a playroom so the boys can be on the floor playing with their toys and not bang up their knees. We still have some wood blinds to hang on the windows and I still need to sew the valance to go in front of the sliding door but it's coming along.
This TV will move into the workout room so Randy can do his P90X and I want to find a huge wall map of the world to hang on this wall. IKEA used to carry them and when I went last week to buy one, the salesperson said they are now discontinued so the hunt is on in Dubai for a large wall mural/world map.
Here is another, "Is she crazy" picture of our laundry area. Vented dryers are very rare in UAE. The majority of people use a condenser dryer where the water extracted from the clothes pools in a cup and you have dump it throughout the drying cycle or they hang their clothes outside on racks to dry. Neither of those options are suitable for this princess, so Randy figured out a way to vent the dryer for me. I don't care if I have a tacky, metal tube going out the back of my laundry closet, you'd understand if you ever had to use a condenser dryer.
This concludes the downstairs tour at this time. Looks like any ol' house you would see in the states, doesn't it? The home gym room and maid's quarters are too full of junk to let the general public view but hopefully I can get those rooms in shape soon and get the upstairs rooms whipped into shape. In a couple of days, inshallah, I'll be able to get pictures posted of our new yard.
