Our Home 11

The kitchen... which is clean now; one of the things when you have visitors isn’t it!

K’s office space at one end, laundry at the other, and the door out into the carport. The kitchen doesn’t really seem to have air conditioning as such, but does have air blowing around a little... sometimes it is warm in there, but most the time it seems ok. Is a good sized kitchen, even with our Home Centre table and stools stuck in the middle of the room.

Not really too much else to say, as it is just the place to make coffee, get food, eat breakfast, and for some reason they decided there was the need for 24 fluorescent tubes to light the room!

Our Home 10

So only two rooms to go, the kitchen and the spare bedroom which is used as the place to hang clothes (but you didn’t really need to know that). Both those rooms are a bit of a mess at the moment – another problem with having such a big villa, both working, and no hired help – so we are going to break from the rooms for a moment.

The villas are pretty close to each other but at the same time far enough to give you some privacy. Well apart from some (like ours) because some have to be at the end of the rows. So outside we do have our own little patch of sand which is slowly being “greened”, but we don’t have any privacy fences as yet (might do something about that, then again might not).

Anyway here are a couple of photos from the bedroom windows upstairs. As I said previously, the master bedroom opens up on to a small balcony but of course it does look straight out over the road into the front of those living at the back so makes it a little useless.

Ok, so I could have said “... and we have a pool”... but “we” don’t. The housing complex has two pools, a gym and a few small roundabouts with fountains on them (that have no water in them and no one seems to know why). K and A have been in the children’s pool, but we still haven’t been in the bigger one yet. There is a sign saying something about no children being allowed in that one, but I think it means without an adult (then again who knows). There is also another couple of buildings that have been rumoured to be a cafe and child minding centre in the future.

Our Home 9

Children’s rooms are children’s rooms no matter where you are (unless you have a full time nanny/minder that runs around after them picking everything up). A’s room is unusually tidy in this photo, but that was because we had a “temp” nanny come in for a few days before he started school while we were both at work. All the bedrooms have built in wardrobes which was a good thing as it was one this expense we had to worry about!

The downside to big villas...

As I am going through the process of uploading photos of our villa, I just thought I would mention that there is a downside to it as well. We sort of ran out of money while trying to furnish it so have been doing it gradually over the summer. This, as I mentioned below, included not getting it completely curtained until recently. This also meant the air conditioning was probably working a bit overtime in summer, while most people are away and just leaving theirs running on a minimal setting (if at all).

We got hit with our first real electricity bill the other day... AED 5,500! Admittedly I had only paid about 1,500 since I arrived, which was the first 6 weeks (or something like that). So this bill was for somewhere between 4 and 5 months. Not quite as bad as it could’ve been, but still a lot of money (and seems like a huge difference compared to Doha, where it was paid for us).

So the moral of the story is completely curtain your place before anything else when you get here. Don’t know how much of a difference it will make it in the long run, but it is my guess the bills will go down a bit now (hope so).

Our Home 8

The master bedroom is slowly developing, but we need to get something on the walls and floor to make it feel a bit more "homely". It has two built-in wardrobes, an ensuite, and a glass door which leads out onto the small back balcony. Looking at the photos it does look relatively unlived in and I guess that is because it is. We have only had the curtains up in the bedrooms for about a month; before that we were quite comfortable on a sofa bed.

Our Home 7

(hhmmm... where to next!)

All of upstairs is a work-in-progress; basically we got to the point where the place was comfortable and are now just slowly adding to our home when we find something we like and/or something second hand comes up for sale.










The upstairs lounge room could also be a master bedroom (depending on the size of our family), as there is a big bathroom off to one side. We want to get another TV and entertainment unit, and think with the balcony and big sliding door it will be a nice space to spend some down time when the weather cools down.

Our Home 6

Don’t actually know what this is called, but I call it the landing (I guess that's right). It is another kind of wasted space that we haven’t really worked out what to do with. So a wooden camel and rug sit there like they are importantly on display. This is the central room upstairs leads off to 3 bedrooms, a bathroom, and the normal sized lounge room.

Our Home 5

We have stairs... they go up... they go down. I guess there really isn’t that much else to say about them apart from there is a full length window halfway, and the curtain is very long. Sometimes it seems like there are far too many steps to climb! I do like the little bits along the side though, which are slowly being filled up with bits and pieces.

Our Home 4

Next I guess would be the Entrance Foyer which is in between M’s office space and the Powder Room, which is more or less a walk in dressing room behind the curtains with a bathroom off to one side (which you have no need to see photos of at all).

The blue dome in the ceiling reminds us of the domes in Villagio in Doha, although a better light fitting would be a nice addition. We did have a big rug on the floor, which ended up moving upstairs, but we will get around to getting another. You may also notice that the walls throughtout the villa are a bit bare; when we see something we like that will change.

Our Home 3

We have a hallway that runs along the back of the kitchen which is more like two small rooms. The first one runs from the dining room through into the kitchen, while the other joins the first one to the entrance foyer (that sounds so pretentious). Since we didn’t have anything else to use them for we decided to make them into little office spaces. So K is set up on the wooden desk in the corner and M is on the black one... By the way the photo isn’t showing you our villa burning down, just some frankincense in the burner.

Our Home 2

Well I guess the best place to go from the lounge room is the dining room, after all they are connected. I noticed in the photos the lounge looks a lot smaller than it is, but both it and the dining room run the full length of the back of the villa; and as I say this A is expending some energy using both rooms as a running track dodging in and out of furniture to the sound of The Beatles (his current music of choice).

By the way the dining table/chairs and 3 sideboards are from Morocco (via Pan in Abu Dhabi Mall), very solid and heavy, and were quite inexpensive.

Our Home 1

I really like our villa, but it does seem to be slowly shrinking as time goes on. When we first walked through the doors we really couldn’t believe how big it was, but as time moves along and we slowly fill it up you only really notice that it is still big when you are trying to find someone or holding a conversation between rooms (or trying to clean the floors).

Anyway I thought I would give those that are interested a tour of home. Over the next week or so I am planning on doing a room a day, and where better to start than with the biggest room in the house, the downstairs lounge room.

I like this photo of K and A having rest pre-furniture!

This really is far too big to be one room, and opening into the dining area at one end makes it even more oversized.

...not so humble home...

I have already eluded to this, but our villa is huge. Not huge in a mansion kind of way, but huge in far bigger than we had before or what we expected. Really though I guess it is no bigger than a family home, but at the moment with hardly any furniture and here by myself is very big and empty. I am actually living in the kitchen and a kind of walk through hallway area that comes straight of it.

Upstairs there are 3 bedrooms and 3 bathrooms plus a big lounge room which opens onto a big split level patio over the double carport. Downstairs is the kitchen, laundry, “powder room” and bathroom, entrance foyer, a huge lounge and dining room, plus the hallway that runs down the back of the kitchen (a bit like two small office areas). Plus off the carport is a small maids quarters which is basically a small bedroom and bathroom that doesn’t have internal access to the villa. There are 12 internal doors, 2 entrance doorways plus 3 glass sliding doors and another two glass doors which open up from two of the bedrooms onto the small back balcony. All the windows and glass doors are double glazed and really only the main entrance door lets in sound and heat. The whole place is centrally air conditioned and there are more lights, light switches and power points that you could poke a whole bundle of sticks at! There is even a small blue domed ceiling in the entrance foyer... Thinking about it, the place probably isn’t much bigger than our home in Brisbane, but compared to Doha it seems about 4 times the size! Will be able to swing many cats with ease!

Of course the main problem is filling it up...

Maybe that is why it is behind Al Ain Mall...

It is a good location and very central... it does seem very quiet until you go outside. But the only "real" noise I hear inside is the call to prayer (which is fine with me) as we a located in between two mosques. The "housing complex" (rather than "compound") is nice and clean with a couple of pools and gym plus for some reason several non-working fountains, as well as 4 entrance gates and numerous security guys, cleaning and gardening guys and maintenance guys but in contrast to Doha not one of them wear blue overalls!