How We've Lived

Whew!  What can I say.  I've been dreaming of starting this blog for so long and it feels so awesome to actually do it today.  If you are reading this - welcome!  I'm so glad you are here and joining us for this adventure.  Honestly, the main reason I started this blog is so that my family has a permanent record of the experiences I'm about to share.  I know that so much of the next many months (years?) is going to be a hectic blur, so it will be good to get some of the details written down so we can look back on them when we are somewhat sane again.  But I'm also open to sharing our experience with others.  I love reading other people's blogs about their homes and lives so hopefully this will be a spot you come back to for ideas and inspiration.  Hopefully.

So, here's the condensed version of how Cory and I have lived for the past, well, years.  Almost fifteen years to be exact.

When Cory and I got married we lived in a tiny little rental in southern Virginia for three years while he finished veterinary school.  Living in that itty bitty house really taught us what it was like to be grown-ups with grown-up responsibilities.  Both of us grew up in comfortable, middle-class homes and to be honest, we didn't know what it was like to struggle.  But as two very young people just starting out in life together, we quickly realized that the middle-class life doesn't just happen.  You have to work really hard for it.  And living in that little house was an awesome way to learn that lesson.  I'll have to dig out a photo of it once we retrieve our boxes of photos from storage.  Did I mention half of our life is in some sort of storage right now? Yeah.  It's a blast.

Anyway, shortly before Cory graduated we started looking at homes to buy back in our hometown in Pennsylvania.  We literally looked at TWO houses.  That's it.  Two.  We went back to Virginia and soon got a phone call that our favorite of the two had an offer on it.  It had literally been on the market for over a year, so we didn't expect that to happen, and we certainly didn't expect to make an aggressive offer in order to beat out that other offer.  In the end, we got the house.  Yay!  We moved in immediately after my teaching contract ended that spring.

Let me restate that Cory and I were young.  Like, early 20s young.  We knew we wanted a family but we didn't know what it was like to raise kids.  We didn't know what to look for in a family house.  We simply bought a house that had a lot of space and a lot of potential.  Okay, I'll be real: We bought a spacious fixer-upper on the cheap.  It was 2002 and the housing market hadn't yet crashed, so even though we paid more than we wanted to at the time, we got a good deal.

Over the years we have done renovations both big and small.  At one point we actually moved out for three months in order to completely gut and remodel the downstairs and our master bedroom upstairs.  We've completed tons of projects and really made the house work for us.

But.  BUT.  We now have four kids.  Our house has three bedrooms.  You do the math.  Plus, it is not in an ideal location for how we live our lives right now.

When you have three bedroms and four kids you have to make some sacrifices.  One of the biggest sacrifices we have made is sharing our bedroom with kiddo #4.  Tessa is now 19 months old and she sleeps in her crib four feet away from our bed.  None of us have slept well at all.  In fact, I can count on one hand the number of times she (and I) have slept through the night during her entire life.  Just for kicks, let's figure this out: Tessa has been on this earth for approximately 575 days and has slept all night 5 times. We are tired.  We are grumpy. We want our bedroom back.

The fact that our current house isn't our forever home isn't a new revelation to us though.  Cory and I knew about five years ago that this house was not going to work for us much longer and so we started looking at real estate.  We looked at quite a few homes, but none of them felt right.  We thought very seriously about building our dream home, but we never found the right piece of land.  The longer we looked, the more desperate we felt.  It seemed as though the home we wanted just simply didn't exist.  At least not in the county we live in.  But.  BUT.

Now to the exciting part . . . after years of searching, debating what we want, and worrying that we would never find our forever home, we bought a house!  It isn't perfect, it isn't what we would have built had we built our dream home, and it isn't where we thought we wanted to live.  But it's so cool.  It's going to be so cool.  And here begins our journey to our dream home.  Follow along as we build not just our dream home, but our dream life for our family.  It's going to be quite the adventure.