We’ve been in our new house for about 9 months now.  There are so many things that we love about this house, which is why we are so glad that we bought when we did and that we were lucky enough to find a home with so many of the things on our checklist.  It has 5 bedrooms, which means that there’s enough for as many kiddos as we end up having, plus a guest room or man-cave.  The backyard it huge and already has some pretty awesome flowering bushes, grown trees, and yet still room for a little improvement.   And it’s in a quiet, family friendly neighborhood.  The hubs and I lived in both a condo and a townhouse before we found our home now.  We’re incredibly grateful to have a space of our own that isn’t connected to anyone else by a wall or a floor, or both.

Hubs and I do like to be able to have some projects to work on to make the house really our own.  Of course that doesn’t mean that given a choice (or a million dollars) that we wouldn’t change 90% of the house in the blink of an eye.  Our list of “To-Do’s” seems to be never-ending.  And like many things in life, there just isn’t enough time in the days or dollars in the wallet to get them all done when you’d like.  As much as we like the projects, it’s also hard not to get yourself burnt out on them.  When we were in the townhouse we completely demolished the master bathroom down to the studs, put in a custom shower with floor to ceiling tiles, redid the vanity, lighting, drywall, and floors as well as added crown molding.  The whole project looked great, but took us almost a year to complete.  It’s easy to start a project but once you get all the way into it, it takes much longer than you originally hoped to actually complete and often you find yourself twisting your own arm to get the small finishing touches complete.  I’m convinced the only reason we finally finished that bathroom is because we had to – can’t sell a house with a bathroom that’s only 3/4 done!

When we moved into the house we barely had enough furniture to fill 1/2 of the rooms.  Since we doubled the amount of space we had in the townhouse, it made sense…but was quite a shock when we moved everything in.  If you want to make yourself feel like the ton of crap you thought you had is actually nearly insignificant, double your space.  Anyway we had 1 very nice sectional and living room setup…but 3 family room/living room spaces to fill.  I finally got the Hubs to break down and let me buy another couch and ottoman so that at least 2 of our main living spaces would have something in them.  It took me a while to feel like this house was actually MY house.  The furniture was a tiny start.

When we walked through the house the first time, all the things that we saw as positive attributes seemed much greater than once we moved in and had to start meshing together our belongings with what existed in the house already.  It’s funny how once you know that your intention is to stay in this place for the next 30+ years, it seems harder to find the perfect place to put your towels, your kitchen utensils, your toiletries.  Even with the knowledge that you’ll have the next 30+ years to move things around and change things up as you see fit, it still took me (and still is to some degree) a while to really feel at home in this house.

Making all the desired changes with an infant makes the process even slower.  After 9 months we have painted only 2 rooms (of 12+), replaced the sprinkler valves, replaced the sprinkler timer, put in new house lights, built a workbench in the garage, put in a new kitchen faucet, got a new refrigerator, and hung up about 75% of our pictures.  Even after typing that I feel like we’ve just barely began to make this place OUR place.  But with each thing that we manage to accomplish, I feel like it’s truly becoming a house that we can call a home.