Playing house in quintessential Seattle

Elisabeth and CJ will be house-sitting here for four months from January to April, but they do short house-sitting stints on and off all year – including this weekend when they invited us for a one-day-early celebration of Aleks and Kat’s 20th birthday.

The view OF the house is pretty darn nice, but the view FROM the house is quintessential Seattle!

I’ll give you the same tour that we got. 

Shall we?

This is the garage with the garden house below…

…and the pool house above.

Inside the pool house there’s a beautiful kitchen and sitting area and two identical shower rooms. 

The pool area is essentially in the front yard --which used to be the backyard when the front entry was in what’s now the backyard… which is the location from which I took that very first picture. (Confused yet?)

This is taken from directly inside the front door (which used to be… oh, never mind!).

And looking the other way…

And when I turned around, standing there…

Here’s the formal living room…

…and the less formal great room…

And the kitchen…

That dog is Tiger, an adorable Golden-Doodle.  Shasta was so jealous!

My favorite room is downstairs.

(Need I say more?)

Actually, if closets count, maybe my favorite room was upstairs, off the master bedroom:

Unlike my current closet, there would probably be room for my shoes in this closet.

Oh wait – I take it back. My favorite upstairs room was this one.  My nightly bath would take on a whole new dimension here!

And the view from the master bedroom ain’t half bad…

There’s a balcony off the master bedroom too.

I forced the birthday twins to pose for a very Seattle mini photo shoot. 

TWENTY?!  When did that happen?! 

While we were touring the house, the birthday strata and cinnamon rolls were in the oven.  Time to make a fruit salad – and mimosas!

Blow out the candles on your… birthday cupcakes!?

After brunch I forced the family to have a hometown family photo taken (thanks CJ!).

It was a wonderful pre-birthday celebration!  Thanks Elisabeth and CJ, for inviting us to not-your (and not-so-humble) quintessential Seattle abode!

We definitely plan to visit again, perhaps walkingdown Queen Anne hill to Seattle Center and doing our favorite thing that I never get tired of – playing Seattle tourist!