Posted by Jess
26 August 2010

Not much to report for Thursday and Friday this past week so we took some pictures of the upstairs of our apartment to keep the tour going.

Our apartment is a 3 bedroom loft.  The girls' bedrooms are on the first floor with the kitchen, a bathroom and living room as you've seen some of already.  There is an open staircase to the second floor which is where the master bedroom and bath are.  Here's the tour.

As you get to the top of the stairs, there is a landing that is all shelves and closet space.

If you turn left, there's just two things - a door out to a shared balcony with a view towards downtown and then a storage closet.  The closet was just an open area but we needed more space to hang things, so we bought tension shower rods at a home-goods store and are using them as closet rods for Jason's dress clothes and some jackets. 
If you turn right at the top of the stairs, you go into our bedroom, which has 3 components - the bed/closet area, a sitting/tv area and the bathroom.  The bed area is first as you walk into the room - it's a king size bed and then we have two tall armoirs that are our closets. 
Next is the sitting and tv area - there's a couch and large tv that sit on a dresser with a bunch of drawers.  This is where our blu-ray player and Wii are hooked up.  To the right of the couch is a patio door opening to the balcony which faces the shopping area (the opposite direction of the balcony mentioned above. 

Ok I was watching an episode of Glee, I admit it!

we have the ironing board set up in front of the patio doors right now - its the least likely place for the kids to get hit by an iron and its too hot to sit outside anyway!

To the left of the the TV and couch is the door into the bathroom.  The bathroom is great - and full of buttons that I'll show you in a bit!  We have a vanity, toilet, and then a walk-in shower and tub area.

This is the only tub in the house so we pretty much just use this bathroom for all of us!

This panel does a few things - the gray button calls the front desk for help if you need it, the yellow button turns on the heat to the shower, the pink button fills the tub automatically (and then stops the water when the tub is full) and the blue button reheats the water in the tub if you've let it sit too long.  The gray arrow buttons on the right side are to change the temperature of the water for the tub and shower and the digital display on the left shows you what temperature you have everything set to.  Fun stuff, but right at Abby's height while she's in the tub so the alarm button makes me a little nervous!

Sorry its out of focus!  This panel is on the wall as you enter the shower/tub area.  The bottom buttons are for running a dryer, cool breeze, heater and ventilator in the shower room.  The top buttons and numbers across are to set a timer for all of those things.  Supposed to work well drying clothes too by hanging them in the shower but we haven't tried it yet. 

Ok, the third and final panel of bathroom buttons is attached to the toilet.  I hope you're ready for this.
The toilet has a built in bidet, seat warmer and dryer.  So you can push the button while you're using the toilet and water sprays up at you to help you out if you need it.  There's one button for girls and one for boys.  Then there's the drying button which blows warm air on your private parts for after you use the bidet.  And you can turn on the seat warmer if you want.  I've been told though that the seat warmer does not shut itself off automatically though and can give you burns if you're not careful!

That's the upstairs tour.  This place also comes with a lot of instruction manuals which is good because we certainly can't read what's printed on the buttons!

Next tour will include the kitchen and living room and we'll try to get some pictures of the views from our balconies, but we only think of it at night and it's pitch black by 7pm so it's hard to get outside pictures.

Kanpai!
Jess