our house...

Spring isn't here but as the tiny clumps of snow that are left from last week melt away I'm all excited to get on the spring cleaning... that doesn't so much mean the actual cleaning part, more the organizing, moving around, making things work for us part.

Living in an old house things get dirty easily but I become easily distracted by the bigger projects that need to get done. Sometimes you have to get creative. It's strange to me to think how differently we live now from the 1920's. Who would think that the entire format of home building could change in 80 years.

We need so many rooms now that we didn't before. Looking at most of the houses in our community people only needed one tiny bathroom in the 1920's... that's just crazy right? We need a family room for our TV's, DVD's, stereos... we need an office for our computer, printer, scanner, charging stations, we need a kitchen big enough to cook a gourmet meal for 12, we need a quiet place to call our own... So we get creative, we move things, organize things, re purpose things until they work for us.

You see even with out the above mentioned monster kitchen this house is my home. Would I be happier with a kitchen 4 times the size I have (I swear it is really really tiny)... maybe.

But when we found our house it was a little bit of a miracle. We'd been looking in the neighborhood for about a year. Feeding our fantastic realtor, Chrissy, all sorts of information as we discovered it. The more houses we looked at the more we knew what we wanted but we just hadn't hit the right note yet... we kept looking and looking until one day she called to tell me she may have found the one. We weren't able to make it into town to check it out until that evening so she went to the house and walked through it on the phone with me. She told me it was the one, she knew it, she described to me all the little details she saw as she strolled through the house and over the phone I slowly fell in love with it. Mike having seen way too many houses and being a bit of a pessimist in general begrudgingly drove into Portland at 6pm knowing we were wasting our time but when we pulled up to the house we both stopped breathing a moment. He looked into the back seat at K and then at me and said "if it isn't falling apart inside we're buying it" I nodded.

About 3 months earlier while I was down the street getting my hair done Mike took K for a walk to a friends house. On their way they walked past this house. Our house. It badly needed a paint job , a new fence and landscaping. It looked like no one had loved it in a long time... but there it was with a for rent sign and Mike and K stared at it for a long moment and Mike said "It's too bad we can't buy that one"...

I heard about the house that day over lunch but I never laid eyes on it until the very moment at 6pm we sat in our car in front of it. By then we were in a rush. We already knew there was an offer being made, our only hope was that our agent had been able to stall the sellers agent long enough so she could present our offer at the same time.

We went inside and looked around. It smelled like old house, dogs, cigarettes and stale drink. The walls had paper peeling from them and large air bubbles beneath too many layers of paint and wallpaper. It was dirty, it was dark and it was a little sad. There were so many things that were just not right and each one made us love the house more. We wanted to make the house as beautiful as we imagined it had been...

Even as we walked through our house other potential buyers showed up. A few with their agents, one who was driving by trying to get a hold of their agent so she and her partner could get a better look and make an offer.
Sadly the sellers agent wasn't patient. She presented the 1st offer she got and didn't mention that there were more forthcoming.

We headed over to the real estate office any way hoping that if we put in a back up offer we may just get lucky. We weren't the only ones to do it but thankfully we were the first.

Obviously you know we got the house, I mean it is the one we are living in raising our child and cats in... our home.

It was 3 weeks before we heard another word on the matter. We'd looked at a couple of houses since but nothing compared to this one. We were on our way to set up K's 2nd birthday party when my cell phone rang. Chrissy said a few things, uttered a few words of caution then said "They want to know if you still want the house".

There was no discussion. Only yes, yes please let us know what we need to do. There were more bumps in the road along the way before we finally got the keys nearly 2 months later. From there our last 3 years in the house have been a string of do it our self projects, contractors, paint, spackle, furniture and dreams... We're not nearly done. Who knows if we ever will be or if we will slowly work on the house into our golden years...

The point? I know I had one... it may have changed somewhere in the writing...

I think the point has become that when a house is really a home it becomes a part of your family and you want to do everything you can to make sure it is the best home it can be...

Or that I need to clean my house so poor Mike doesn't go any more insane than he already is...