home in marshall

When preparing to move to Alaska last year I relied so much on the blog posts of others to give me insight into the everyday parts of life on the Yukon.  I found a few people's blogs and read them entirely.  In the spirit of adding to the collective voice, I thought it would be good to share about my home in Marshall.  

Marshall teaching housing is two quadplex buildings, with four units in each building.  The two outside units have two bedrooms and the two inside units have three. 

It worked out that Liz and I were assigned a three bedroom unit for the two of us.  The third bedroom is downstairs and we just shut the door and treated it like a closet for spare furniture.  Being that our housing comes fully furnished we had end tables, lamps, and beds to spare.  The family that lived there before us had a full household, it took a bit to move the furniture to our liking.  All the units have two bathrooms, so we each had our own.

Before moving, we had both shipped boxes of our things to the school.  They were there waiting for us, thank you Nick and Debbie, the day we got there.  You'll notice three methods of shipping: rubbermaid totes, amazon prime, and priority USPS.  These are the best ways to ensure intact and/or timely delivery.

All units have an arctic entry, or extra large mudroom.  Liz and I put two chairs in ours to sit in the gearing up process or quickly unload gear.  Shoes and boots always came off here.  This room helped to keep the dust and dirt levels down in the house. 

 We kept our living room well lit.  Housing comes furnished and Marshall's is about five years old, making everything in pretty good shape.  The arctic entry is dark, to the right. 

This was my favorite window in the house.  It looked out onto the tundra and hills in the distance.

The stairs from the living room to the second level.  Two story homes are kind of rare thing in the north.  Teacher housing is the tallest residential structure in the village.

In the living room, the door to the left lead to the spare bedroom and the right was my bathroom. 

The kitchen is very spacious.  Our unit was ADA compliant, which explains the opening under the sink.

Every unit also has the laundry/freezer room.  We were pretty lucky to have new front-loading large capacity laundry units.  This room is good for storing that stock-pile of totes you now own.

The kitchen pantry was under the stairs.  Storage was never an issue in this house.

Those stairs.

Each unit has two bedrooms on the second level, one at the top of the stairs and one down the hall.  The second bathroom is also on the second floor, as well as a large hall closet.

  My room was the smaller of the two, I chose the one closer to the stairs because of Stella.  It had a nice window that just looked onto the other units.

My room also had a nice walk-in closet.  I never even used the dresser.

Liz's room was the master, it was slightly larger with an extra-large window.  The closet was also a good size.  

Our house felt like a lot of space for two people with very little stuff.  At Halloween and Christmas Liz decorated to make if feel festive.  But mostly it was a nice space to be.  When it's been a long, tough day the calm of our home was always a welcome relief.