My Dream Vacation - Day 1

This dream started about 5 years ago on a MOPS retreat to Ocean Shores. One of our Mentor Moms Diane had just taken a little drive with her husband up to this new community called Seabrook. She just thought it was the cutest place and there was a quaint little cafe so she thought it would be fun for us to go explore and have some dessert. After eating our yummy dessert we took a nice stroll around the community...much of it was still under construction at the time. 3 1/2 years and lots of dreaming later and I decided it was time to see if I could make my dream come true. I asked my parents, my brother and sister-in-law and some close friends that are more like family...The Kuch's...if they wanted to help me make this dream come true for my 35th birthday which was a year and a half away. They all thought that was a great idea!

 After searching online a bit I had found what I thought was going to the perfect house, but it turned out to be a bit too big and expensive for us. That's when I found the perfect house to rent. My parents, The Kuch's and Michael and I and our kiddos all stayed in The Oyster House. Ryan and Steph rented The Little Pearl which is the carriage house to The Oyster House. It was great! 

Literally just a couple hours after getting home from Indianapolis we were all packed and ready to head to Seabrook. We knew that our house probably wasn't going to be ready since we were there before 3pm, but we figured we would go explore the beach until it was. Luck would have it that the moment I walked into the rental office was the moment the cleaning staff called and said our house was ready. Sweet!

Ryan and Steph were checking into their house while we were unpacking ours. My parents and The Kuch's hadn't arrived yet. The funny thing is the house had come available so quickly that they hadn't even had time to change the code on the lock to our new code. I had to call the office and they had to send a maintenance guy out to reprogram the lock for us. Once we got inside the floors were still wet from them being mopped! I'd say we really took advantage of the house as quickly as we could. 

Right when you walk in the door you are in the living room. It was nice and cozy...we did some rearranging of the furniture though...the couch on the right didn't make sense so we moved it so it was facing the fireplace. 

Here's a view from the kitchen facing the dining room and living room. I absolutely LOVED that dining room table. It was big and heavy and the benches were great to fit lots of people on. Plus if you're not sitting on them they can completely push under the table. 

Here's the view of the kitchen from the dining room. This kitchen was huge...almost too huge. It was hard to find things, but it was great since we had 13 people staying in one house. The doorway on the right was the door into the room Owen and Jack shared. 

Here's the other side of the kitchen...there were a total of 3 sinks! 

Here's a better view of the kitchen. In the back you'll see there is a built-in nook. There were 7 kids...4 of ours and 3 of The Kuch's and they all fit in that nook. It was great! 

Here's a view of Owen and Jack's room. It's technically the game room since it's the room with the Wii in it, but that nice bed has a trundle and it worked perfectly for the boys. It also became the downstairs playroom for the kids. That first night Owen and Jack were actually up at 2am playing on the Wii so after that the controllers stayed in our room. 

Michael and I had the room on the first floor. When you came in the house it was the door to the right. It had a nice King size bed. I forgot to take a picture when we first got there when the bed was made all nice. This was taken when we were packing up to leave. Also on the first floor was our families bathroom. There were 3 bathrooms in the house so each family got their own so we didn't have to share. 

Something that surprised me was this little nook under the stairs. It was in the hallway across from the bathroom. There was nothing said about it on the website at all. It was such a cute way to use that wasted space under the stairs. There were two of those magnet boards in there. Of course the kids thought this was pretty cool! 

There was this cool landing area upstairs that ended up being a great place for the kids to play. 

Here is a picture of the stairs and that door straight across is Ga-Ga & Pa's room. 

Upstairs there were a total of 3 bedrooms....1 for Bill & Christina and 1 for their kids and then the Master Suite was for my parents. 

Here's their master bath and since there wasn't technically enough beds to fit all of us Zeke and Ella ended up on pallets in the master bedroom closet. 

That first night it was pretty rainy so we mostly stayed in and got settled. My brother made a nice BBQ dinner for all of us. The above picture is the view from Ryan and Steph's carriage house looking down on The Oyster Houses back porch. So pretty! By this point I hadn't really slept since since Saturday morning and it was Sunday night so I was ready for some good sleep!