Sunday, July 16, 2017

Our home-tel in Brigham City (*****)

We had a wonderful experience with our Airbnb, a place called The Temple View Inn. I called it our home-tel (home-hotel). The family is moving out of the place and using it as an airbnb for some extra income, so we had this four bedroom home to ourselves. The Airbnb website doesn't so the place justice:

For the kids, the highlight was this narrow attic playroom. (Superstar says, no, his highlight was the Wii. "I had no idea they would have a Wii.") Okay, but the kids spent many hours in the playroom and it was the first thing they mentioned when we talked to other people about our home-tel. Lots of toys of many kinds, a TV/VCR with a stack of Disney movies, and most importantly a keyboard. The kids are begging us to get a keyboard. Why, when you don't play the piano we have? or the toy piano we already have?


Princess slept in the coastal-Africa room while the boys took the Cars room. We were upstairs with two rooms to choose from: one decorated like Nauvoo with a 50lb sunstone doorstop, a carved hope chest, pictures and busts of Joseph and Emma, a crocheted-lace Nauvoo temple, and LDS church history books; the other in white and blue with wedding pictures. We could see the Brigham City temple from the Nauvoo room. We made Nauvoo our main bedroom and used the blue room for naps.


The only weird thing was that there were no doors to the upstairs bedrooms.Well, I guess it wasn't the only weird thing. Only two electrical outlets in the entire house had three prongs - everything else was 2-prong. One reason we took a lot of detailed pictures of every view of the house was so we could put back the knick-knacks and pictures that needed to be moved at once so the kids didn't break them. Still didn't get everything enough out of the way, but I think we protected (or repaired) the vast majority.

And decorative pillows! SO MANY decorative pillows!


As you can see, they really have an eye for interior decorating. It's inspired us to do a better job with that. We've acquired a few more pictures during and after the trip to spruce up the walls and Joy's already blessed our bed with a pair of decorative pillows. We finally printed up some pictures of the kids to hang on the wall. Who knows, we might even get Really fancy and upgrade some of our DI/garage sale furniture one of these days!


There was a cozy patio with a porch swing, outdoor grill, some benches and chairs. Superstar also really liked the swing sets. I enjoyed that the patio was decked out with white Christmas lights so you could have a lit area in the evening. Uncle Doug gave the kids a giant green ball to play with. There was even a pack-n-play for an infant, though JT is beyond that these days.





Joy says, "I could find just about anything I needed to cook meals with." This vacation in UT was unique because we weren't only moochers, we invited some of her family over too! It was nice having a place large enough for a family of 12 or more to eat and entertain comfortably.

The kids were also taken in by the decorative phrases scattered throughout the house. I think Princess' favorite was "oatmeal raisin cookies that look like chocolate chip are the reason I have trust issues."


The neighbors were nice and friendly. One of the neighbors is the fix-it-man for the property and another neighbor is the cleaning lady, so there's someone nearby to help out. We attended the local ward the first week and actually sat next to my seminary director's grandfather - really nice guy who I then proceeded to meet up with every week at the temple. The kids made instant friends with half the neighborhood and a few people at church invited us to move in permanently. As I said: nice, friendly place.


There are missionaries living downstairs. Technically the washing machine and dryer belong to their apartment, but the owners and elders were kind enough to let us use them since we were staying there so long and were responsible for keeping the place clean. I gather that's not usually feasible.

All in all, it was a very cozy, comfortable, beautiful place to stay and at a very affordable price. We really lucked out and would be happy to stay there again!

No comments:

Post a Comment