Home Sweet Home

One of the nicest things about going away for a week is that it affords you the opportunity to fall in love with your home again when you return.  When it comes to our house, absence definitely makes the heart grow fonder, while familiarity (especially the over-familiarity one experiences with repetitive household chores!) can sometimes breed contempt.  My husband and I have a shared love affair with our house, and I think our time away rekindled the romance.

While driving back and forth between Texas and Lousiana, the hubs and I spent a good part of those two days chatting about plans for our house.  Now that we know Little One is a girl, we'll be rearranging rooms before she gets here.  Our original plan was for us to move into the largest bedroom, which is in the converted attic.  But then my father-in-law mentioned the low ceilings (it's built into the eves of the house and has diagonal walls and lower ceilings than the first floor) and wondered how my tall husband would fare.  We went through the whole thought process of instead making the attic a nursery for both kids, keeping our downstairs bedroom and turning our son's room into a guest/playroom.

I'm an avid amateur interior decorator.  Well, mostly in my mind.  I have to imagine everything from the color paint we'll put on the walls to where each piece of furniture will go, what we can spruce up and reuse from elsewhere in the house, and what new items we might need to buy.  Sometimes I google prices and draw up an imaginary budget, but being as we were stuck in the car traveling through the small towns of eastern Texas and entirely lacking in internet access, I didn't go quite that far this time.  I did design an adorable boy-girl nursery though, built into the slanted eves of our warm attic bedroom.

Alas, it will never see the light of day since we ultimately decided we would move up there again by the end of the conversation.  After I put my boy to bed tonight, I went upstairs and sat on the futon we keep in the attic for guests.  I imagined paint for the walls, and tile for the small bathroom floor, and furniture adopted from the living room, repainted and repurposed for a brand new master bedroom.  I'm excited to see how it eventually turns out.

After sketching out blueprints in my brain I came downstairs and wandered through the house, room to room in the dark, opening windows and doors to let in the cool night air.  In each room I saw brand new possibilities, the beauty of the work we've done so far and the promise of all the years to come, living in this house, growing our family.  Not just an imaginary family somewhere in the future, but this family, this one we've got, this one we're making right now.

I'm so happy to be home.