We moved into our home three and a half
years ago. And listen — I did not
love her. At all.
Of all the houses we toured, this was the one I wanted the least. She was basically a 1970s time capsule with a mortgage. Pink rugs. Pink walls. A kitchen so tiny and outdated it looked like the set of a sitcom where someone burns toast every episode.
It was the kind of house realtors describe as having “great bones,” which is code for: “Every single thing here will collapse unless you devote your next decade—and several internal organs—to renovations.”
But after life slowed down….
And suddenly… I was home.
Not visiting.
Not sprinting in and out.
Not waving at my family like I lived in an airport terminal.
Home. Full-time. Three hundred and sixty-five days in a row.
Before this year, I existed here like a ghost with a very consistent commute. I’d leave at 6:30 a.m., come home at 7:30 p.m., and collapse long enough to reset the cycle. Weekends were just a blur of shuttling kids from activity to activity, like an unpaid Uber driver who also carries snacks.
If you had asked me back then what my home looked like, I could have described… maybe five rooms? Vaguely? In the dark?
But being home all the time has changed my eyes.
At first, I still saw what I always saw: A house stuck in time. Frozen in the Nixon administration.
A structure held together by memories, stubbornness, and my whispered prayer every time the heating system wheezed itself awake.
But my kids? They saw magic.
They loved our outdated kitchen — the one Archie and Edith Bunker absolutely could’ve eaten in. They didn’t notice the roof that retires every time it rains, or the bathrooms that say “motel chic” if you turn the lights low and believe in miracles.
They see comfort.
They see home.
They see us.
And after a year of being here — really being here — I finally started to see it too.
I see a house that has hugged us through hard seasons and held us during decent ones. A house that loves our dogs, tolerates our chickens, grows hydrangeas that make Erin gasp, and lets my girls cartwheel across the front lawn like it was built just for their joy.
I see sunsets out front and sunrises out back — and I see that they were always there. I just never slowed down long enough to notice.
This house isn’t shiny. She’s not trendy.
She will never appear on HGTV unless they launch a show called “We Tried Our Best.”
But she has a soul.
We are only her second owners. The first lived here fifty years. Fifty. I used to wonder how that was possible. We ran into someone who visited the house often after her husband died and said, the house and the owner got her through a very hard time.
Now I hope we can do the same for the next fifty years. Because here’s the truth I couldn’t see until this year forced me to stop moving:
I didn’t need a different house. I needed a different pace.
I used to scroll Zillow looking for escape. Now I wander Home Depot looking for ways to honor the home that held me when I finally stopped running.
It wasn’t the house that changed. It was me.
I didn’t fall in love with this house by fixing it. I fell in love with it by finally staying long enough to be changed.
I didn’t fall in love with this house by changing it — I fell in love by letting it change me.
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