This Old House...

I'm typing this to you all with a computer atop 2 cardboard boxes while sitting on a lone dining room chair. The rest of our belongings are scattered about in various areas, piled in the garage waiting to be loaded onto a moving truck, or patiently waiting their turn in one of 2 storage garages.

In case you haven't heard, we're on the move.

We're all excited. The plain truth is simple: We've outgrown our current home. And with the market as such, it was the right time for us to pick up and move to greener pastures. So, we'll be going from a house with 2 bedrooms and just around 1200 square feet to a house with 4 bedrooms and just under 2300 square feet. It will provide ample space for our current needs and also if we need additional room we won't be so limited.

Plus it has a brand new kitchen. It's the focal point of the whole house.

But it's kind of bittersweet. As I sit here and pack and prep and move stuff out of our current house, I'm reminded of just what this house means to Elli and I. I was newly hired at the VA and not even a week into work when we signed off and moved into this house. We were excited to be homeowners and looking back we did rush into this and had we taken a year or two we would've been better off. Regardless, we had our first home. It was a tiny starter home on a corner lot and had an old school charm to it (it was built in the early 30's). But that old school charm meant plaster walls, old electrical wiring, somewhat dated plumbing, and a concrete slabbed cinder block basement pretty much only good to house appliances such as the furnace and water heater and be used as storage and a laundry room.

So throughout the years I grumbled about patching yet another crack in the plaster, I grumbled about the 2 pronged outlets. I grumbled when it took me 5 hours to replace an electrical outlet. I grumbled when we had to replace the roof, I grumbled when we had to replace the drafty large window in our playroom, and I grumbled about the confining space as we attained more stuff yet didn't attain more square footage.

But for all the grumbling, I sit here today and I simply can't forget that this will forever be our first house. This will be the thing we nervously set foot in that day so long ago in 2005. It will be the site of our first mortgage payment, our first utility upgrade, our first home improvement project. It will be the site of our first run in with the law (someone stole stuff out of our garage), and it will be the site of, shall we say, practice for my handy man skills.

And it will be in our memory as the place where we brought home our two children; Dav in 2008 and HM in 2011. I will always remember pacing these scuffed up and faded wood floors at 3am rocking a fussy infant back to sleep. I will remember placing a sick toddler up on the counter next to the sink as I measure out ear infection medicine. And I will remember all the early mornings spent gathered around the island in the kitchen as we all got ready to go to work and daycare while eating peanut butter toast.

In the past 7+ years, I've repeatedly said how much I hated this house. It was a lie every time.

I love this house. And I'm going to miss it something fierce. I'm excited for our new house and look forward to making many new memories there, and I'm glad this house is going to a couple with a younger child as well. This house is a great one to start off in, and I couldn't have asked for a better one.

To our Maplewood neighbors reading this, thanks for the years of friendship. Thru the miracle of social media I'm sure we'll keep in touch. And Mounds View isn't all that far away. Know that this area will still be a training ground for our biking needs and you'll see us cruising on thru I'm sure plenty of times in the future. Thanks for helping making this a home!