I'm not sure how I feel about our house. Some days, like when I'm walking down the street with Oliver and looking at it from a distance, I love our house. It stands out while blending in with the neighborhood. The colors on it are great, and it's a decent sized house without being too big for now. I love that we have a backyard. I love the creaks in the floor and the porch swing that Oliver still likes to sit in with me. And yet. It's not so much that the upkeep makes me uneasy -- we need to have our front porch power washed, the front of the house scraped and repainted (after some of the paint bubbled and peeled from a leak we dealt with), the back patio fixed or replaced, the upstairs windows replaced, the kitchen walls around the table are stained because I stupidly didn't use semi-gloss when we had it painted, and so on and so on. I know houses require upkeep, and it's just a matter of time and money, both of which we periodically have. Our loan goes down only a little each month, but if we're here five years, it will certainly have been worth it over renting. And it got us a great federal tax refund. It's not even the cleaning upkeep -- now that the weather's nice, the kitchen floor is constantly filthy from dogs and little boys going in and out, and there's constantly dog hair all over the floor, too, and I can't keep the mold out of the shower in the master bath. I don't even think it's that we're not done setting up shop completely -- there'll eventually be a new desk in the reading room, a cushion for the window bench and some pillows in the living room, rugs upstairs, and new master bedroom suite at the very end.
It's just that, somehow, it doesn't look right to me. I mean, if I visited someone else's house and it looked just like mine, I'd think it was cute. But it doesn't look right to me in our house. I think a lot of it has to do with having seen it set up by the prior owners, who had bolder, more modern, and still very tasteful decorating styles. It was probably part of what sold us the house -- it was just cute. And while I think what we've done with it serves us a lot better, is a lot more functional now and in the long run, it's just not, well, as cute. I'm just not a decorator, and I have a really hard time making decisions. I like the furniture we've picked out. The paint colors. I'm not kind of neutral on the rugs (which Lucy has, as predicted, peed on, hence the concurrent purchase of a steam cleaner). But it just doesn't seem to all go together once put in a room.
I don't know if I'll ever get used to it and really love it. Part of me wishes we'd bought the other house we looked at, which was must more neutral and wouldn't have come with this pre-expectation of looking a certain way when done. But that house didn't have a yard or a garage, two things that have really served us well. And it had a neighbor with loud barking dogs chained out back and was on a street with no sidewalk. I'm sure when we leave here we'll remember it as a great house, and I certainly am thankful to be able to afford to live in and make my own such a wonderful house, one located only a 20 minutes walk or 5 minute drive from Wes's work, Peabody's campus, and Oliver's daycare. I'm just hoping that, at some point, it also feels like my home.
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