Dream House

When we bought our current home, I was elated. It's so cute, with the brick front, pond view, bay window, vaulted ceilings. It was easily the 25th house we'd seen and when we walked in I knew it was the one. 

Now that the kids are teenagers, and since I work from home, this house is getting too small. We have a living room, eat-in kitchen, and three bedrooms. No office and no family room for the kids to hang in with their friends. And frankly I'm tired of them hogging the tv. 

Not long after we moved in, a house across the pond went up for sale. We toured it with a friend who was house shopping and we loved it, but we had a new home we were very happy with. 

Recently, now a few years later, the house went on the market again. Matt and I started daydreaming about moving over there, having a loft and an extra family room and almost twice the square footage... So we checked the price. The payment would have been about $150 more a month, and we'd still have our great neighborhood and a deck and the view of our little pond!

I excitedly wrote a late night email to our realtor and against my better judgement started planning to move my office to that lovely loft area and mentally making a list of things to do to prep our house for listing. 

The next morning the realtor informed me that there was already an accepted offer on the perfect house. 

But we were already anticipating the relief of having space for these darn teens! So we started looking online for other homes. But nothing is out there with our essential list of features: same neighborhood, pond view, deck, extra space, minimal price increase. Those are all required items to get us to leave our cozy, wonderful, but slightly too-small home. And so we decided to stay. 

And a week later, I'm seeing my home with new appreciation. I don't have a separate office, or an extra family room, but I can't imagine leaving my deck with a view, the light fixtures we carefully selected and/or spray painted, our tulip tree, and our little bay window. This is home. At least until that house is on the market again. 

In the meantime, as I often do, I've decided we need more organization and then it won't feel so small. So last week, without measurements or planning or any of those time-wasters, I headed to Home Depot for supplies. 

And with only one extra trip back for exchanges and only one set of incorrectly drilled holes, I have painted our master closet and installed shelves to replace the bookshelf I stuck in there. We also added track lights to fully illuminate all the clothes I have that don't fit. 

This one minimal before and after pic truly doesn't do it justice, but you can see that the storage is much improved, and I love going in there for clothes now! It's so clean and bright! 

I'm so handy!  And my husband is getting really good at replacing light fixtures. This makes #5 so far. 

That house needs to get listed because I'm running out of lights to replace.