As you walk up to my front door, which faces the river, you’ll see a refrigerator in the yard. I’m not sure why it ended up there or how long it’s been there. However, I think it may find a second life as a fish smoker! The house is built about four feet off the ground to account for the permafrost and occasional flooding from the river. To the right is the home of Kevin and Gina McCalla (principal and his wife) and to the left is a house that has been converted into the 6th grade classroom. The big orange building behind our house is the main school building.
As you approach the front steps and get a closer look up under the house, you will notice all sorts of treasures – mostly there are sleds for pulling behind snowgos (snowmobiles). You can see the exposed pipe because nothing is buried under ground – too wet and too frozen. There is also an abundance of driftwood up under the house from previous floods.
Here is the view from my front door – that’s the Kwethluk River, a tributary of the Kuskokwim River.
Welcome to the Mud Room. This is the first room you walk in to when entering my house – not my idea of a good first impression, but it definitely has its purpose… to contain the mud. I put the rugs down, hoping that would help, but it turns out they are only a hindrance – the rugs are coming up and we will just have a muddy floor that I’ll clean once a week. You can see our boots there, too – standard footwear here – I’ll be carrying my “cute” shoes to school in my backpack. The highlight of the Mud Room is the huge chest freezer that I intend to fill with a bush order of frozen food in the next couple of weeks.
We’re pretty well moved in, now. It took a lot of cleaning and a lot of elbow grease, but we are managing to make this house our home. The pictures in this blog were taken after much of the work was done. However, we do have slip covers coming for the living room furniture, which is very worn, fairly dirty, and horribly dated.
The TV doesn’t seem nearly as small as it looks in this picture – some sort of entertainment center to put the TV on (it’s sitting on one of my bedroom tables right now) would help, but that’s definitely not a priority around here… maybe I can find a local carpenter to make one for me.
The kitchen is great – nice and big with a large dining table, gas stove, and lots of counter and cabinet space.
We even have a stand-up freezer in addition to a large refrigerator/freezer in the kitchen! (yes, freezer #2)
My bedroom is comfortable. However, I still need to clean the dried, dead mosquitoes off the walls and ceiling before I hang pictures – thanks to the bachelors that lived here before us! LOL
I have a big walk-in closet and a large dresser. Noticeably absent is a mirror. The only mirror in the entire house is in the bathroom – about a 12x18 inch mirror over the sink. Now, I don’t consider myself vain, but I do have a mirror on order from Amazon.com to hang over my dresser. Again, no mirrors might have worked just fine for those bachelors, but Sarah and I need something more.
Our bathroom is tiny, but functional. Notice the mirror is so close to the right wall that one has to lean against the bathroom door (or the towel rack that’s on the wall behind the door) to get a full view. Oh, and a special touch is the duct tape on the toilet seat. The second time I sat on that toilet seat, it cracked in half – nice. But, thankfully, duct tape fixes everything from window screens to toilet seats.
The laundry room is a complete luxury to have in the bush and I am SOOOO thankful for mine!
So, there you have it – our new home in Kwethluk, Alaska… Yupik village of 750.
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