We've lived in 14 homes in the 40 years we've been married and we think this one is the nicest of them all! We hope to be in it for a very long time!

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This is the end of the

"A House in the South"

photo blog.

I'll replace these photos with updated ones when rooms are completed. Scroll to the bottom of the page to view the blog in the proper order. All of the photos look better in a larger format, so click on them to enlarge them.

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Thanks for looking and happy house decorating!

The other rooms in the house are a hobby room, a laundry room near all the bedrooms, and three other bathrooms: guest bath, powder room, and utility room bath.

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I found a darling little bombay chest and put it in the laundry room, but it looked weird, so I moved it to the hobby room. It looks weird there too, but I definitely will find someplace else for my CD player and maybe it won't look so odd when I find the right picture to hang above it.

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We put an armoire in the laundry room across from the washer/dryer. It holds several laundry baskets for sorting clothes, holds hangers, and has a pull-out surface that acts as a folding table. And the best part is everything is behind closed doors when I'm not using it.

The guest bedroom is definitely a work in progress. We have a couple pieces of antique furniture, but no bed yet. The room will be done in dusty pink and green. The French doors lead to the front porch and the black rockers.

Bob's office furniture should arrive in a couple of weeks. Meanwhile he's doing all his computer work on a folding table. At least he has his leather lazyboy - sometimes it seems he lives in that chair!

This is the master bathroom.

Bob's closet is behind the double doors in the background in this photo. I have a walk-in closet (almost like a dressing room) in the master bedroom.

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Frankly, the best part of this bathroom is the all-tile shower. It's huge and has both a shower head and a handheld nozzle. You can turn the water on with the handheld to get the temperature just right before turning on the overhead - no more goosebumps while waiting for the water to get hot. And there are two large tile seats so you can stretch out and relax. We've never taken so many showers in our life as we have over the last three weeks!

We like to close these gorgeous doors to the bedroom - it makes us feel like we're staying in an elegant hotel in the French countryside -well, at least it makes me feel that way - Bob isn't exactly into "pretend" musings of that kind!

The master bedroom is a major work in progress. We're still looking for a duvet set for the beds and we don't have window treatments. In fact, the windows are a problem because we love the openness of them and don't want to detract from that with window coverings. But it does get pretty bright at 6 AM, a time much too early for us to be getting up!

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And after 40 years of marriage, we finally decided to have separate beds. Our individual sleeping idiosyncracies warranted it years ago, but we resisted.

The master bedroom can be reached through large double doors from the great room or through a hallway off the rotunda.

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Every room in the house can be reached from one of three hallways off the rotunda, a neat feature of the house plan, we thought.

The great room is an extension of the kitchen/nook area. There are large bay windows overlooking the backyard and golf course. We are still waiting for one gold chair and an ottoman to be delivered.

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The fireplace mantel lacks something and we're working on that.

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We are considering whether to have a gas fireplace installed that works with a flip of a switch or to try our hand at a real fireplace; one would be easier and cleaner, but the other would be more authentic.

We frequently take our morning coffee out to the back porch and watch the golfers go by. The first three photos above show the view over our backyard. The last photo is of the back of our house from the golf course.

The kitchen opens into the bright and cheerful breakfast nook

We bought these prints at an antique shop in downtown Aiken. They depict scenes of the railroad at the turn of the century on main street. The sign at the railroad station in one print says "AIKEN". We thought they were neat and since the sketches are done in an olive green, they match the kitchen cabinets.

The kitchen is large with a center island and a glass cooktop in the middle. The double stainless steel sinks are deep and the hardware is heavy. There's a trash compactor, a walk-in pantry, a bread drawer, a convection oven, and a cabinet made for cookie sheets and flat kitchenware.

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Don't panic, the green finish on the cabinetry isn't quite as bright as it appears in these photos. Note the two pictures on the wall to the left of the cabinets in the 3rd photo above - more on those next.

This hallway runs parallel to the foyer rotunda. It leads from my office to the kitchen. It also leads to a hallway to a bathroom and to the 2-car garage. On one side of this hallway is a cabinet for books and on the other side is a beautiful piece of art that we found at the gallery in town.