make a little birdhouse in your soul

Yesterday we rode our bikes to the lot where the new house is being built. Presently we own a deep hole in the ground with a bit of concrete, a few empty pop cans and an abandoned container of Skoal.

The search for a new house was motivated, primarily, by the desire for a bigger bathroom. Something we always wanted was a bathtub big enough to play in together, and if the tub could have jacuzzi jets, even better! (Right now when we squeeze into the tub together there's barely room for the water.)

Other things we dreamed of included having a mainfloor laundry instead of doing laundry in the basement. And Shawn had visions of a big kitchen. And I wanted wood floors instead of carpet so that the puppies couldn't do as much damage.

Somehow we found what we were looking for... and while we likely won't ever be able to decorate as successfully as the showhome people managed to... this is basically what our new house will look like.


Most of all we were just excited about choosing things together. I bought the first place by myself when I was still single... and Shawn picked the current house by himself because we were living in different cities. This is the first time we've chosen a home together, and the first time, actually, that we've had the opportunity to choose colours, cabinets, fixtures, floors and countertops and all that kind of stuff. The house we're in now is brand new, but was a spec home, as neutral as neutral can be. It's been such fun to choose things that represent our tastes more.

We were hugely fortunate in that we put the deposit down on our new place just about three minutes before the housing market went insane here. That means our house price is locked down while it's being built and the price we can sell our current house for goes up while we wait. We were incredibly lucky with our timing because it certainly had nothing to do with planning.

Moving during the winter is going to be no fun... but Shawn says he wants to hire movers rather than moving things ourselves. This way there's a guarantee of no damage to our furniture (which matters not since most of our furniture is pretty old and dented anyway) but also of no damage to the walls and floors of the new place, which does make a bit of sense. The fact that we're moving again soon makes me feel justified in the fact that I've never fully finished unpacking from the last move, never hung up any pictures on the walls, never made it really "ours".

The new place will be different, I think, in that it already feels like home because we put so much thought into planning the way we wanted it to look.

Sometimes it seems shallow to be so excited about things - and like we shouldn't be giving ourselves such an extravagant gift. But simultaneously, I know we've both sacrificed a lot over the years to get to this place. Just being back together under one roof again has made all the difference in the world. It feels like the pieces are starting to fit into place, and real life has finally begun.