I didn’t buy this house because I hated our old one.
Actually, our old house was perfectly fine. It was in the school district we wanted, it had three bedrooms, and there was absolutely no reason we couldn’t bring a baby home to it.
Except I was pregnant, nesting, and apparently my version of nesting became a full-blown nest.
We were also busting at the seams. Our house had almost no storage, and once we cleaned out the bedroom that was going to become the nursery, we realized just how much stuff we’d been hiding in there. Then came the baby showers and my husband’s diaper party, and suddenly we had an entirely new category of things to find homes for. The diapers were especially hard to ignore because, as it turns out, a stockpile of diapers takes up a ridiculous amount of space.
Everywhere I looked, it felt like we were running out of places to put our life. So I started looking at houses on Zillow. Not necessarily because we’d decided to move. I just wanted to look. Which, as it turns out, can turn into buying a house pretty quickly.
My husband’s friend was a realtor, so we were able to get into houses fairly easily. We actually put an offer on one that neither of us really loved. It was better than what we had, but neither of us felt particularly good about it.
Then the next morning, this house hit the market.
It was about 20 seconds away from the house we already owned, and I saw it almost immediately. We were the first people through the door that same day, and this one felt different.
It had the things we were actually looking for: more rooms, so much more storage, a fenced backyard for our dogs, the neighborhood we wanted, and a field behind us that gave us some privacy.
We rescinded our offer on the other house and made one on this one. My husband was understandably a little nervous about how quickly we’d gone from casually looking at Zillow to buying another house, but who says no to a pregnant wife?
And we did it. We got the house.
Our baby wasn’t due for another month, and we had planned this beautifully. We closed on the new house and gave ourselves an entire week to move. Our families came over to help us clean, and the road connecting our two streets, which had conveniently been under construction, actually reopened the morning we closed.
Instead of a 15-minute, out-of-the-way drive, we’d now be able to get from one house to the other in seconds. Perfect. I remember thinking how nicely everything had worked out.
My water broke that night.
Four weeks early.
So instead of moving into our new house the next morning, we were having a baby.
While we were at the hospital, our family and friends continued on with the plan and moved us in. They even packed everything we’d intentionally left unpacked because, you know, we had a week.
Our son spent eight days in the NICU, and on our very first wedding anniversary, we finally got to bring him home.
After everything that had happened, it felt like maybe we were finally being smiled upon. Except coming home to this house didn’t really feel like coming home to me.
It felt like a hotel.
It was ours. Our furniture was in it. Our belongings were in it-somewhere. This was the house we’d made this huge decision to buy because it had everything our growing family needed. But it didn’t feel like mine.
We started working on it almost immediately. Once we were actually living here, we began noticing all the little things you don’t necessarily catch during a quick showing. The paint was one of the first. There were areas that needed better coverage, edges we wanted to clean up, and ceilings that were ready for some attention.
So we repainted most of the upstairs and, somewhat hilariously, chose the same color.
We liked it. We still like it. What we needed at that point wasn’t a completely different house; we needed the one we had to feel more finished.
I actually do want to change the wall color someday. We’ve always planned to replace our dark floors with something lighter, and when we do, I think I’ll want lighter walls too. But that isn’t the full look we’re ready for yet, so the walls stay.
I’ve gotten much more comfortable with that over the years. Something can be the right choice for your home right now without having to be the choice you make forever.
We kept working on the house little by little. Paint, adding new carpet, decorating, projects here and there. My husband did most of those early projects while I cared for our newborn, and eventually I started becoming much more hands-on too.
There was never a big transformation, and there really couldn’t be. Time, money and resources are hard to come by when you move into a house with a newborn and then have another baby two years later.
And even as we changed things, I still couldn’t shake the feeling that something was missing.
Then one day, I was sitting at my parents’ house. They had moved out of the house I grew up in about a year before we bought ours, so this wasn’t my childhood home. I had never lived there.
And yet, sitting there that day, I realized something that honestly bothered me: their house felt more like home to me than mine did.
How?
There weren’t childhood memories attached to those walls. I hadn’t grown up there. There was no logical reason that house should feel more like home to me than the one I went home to every night. But it did, and I started looking around.
Their house felt warm. Comfortable. Inviting. The decor didn’t just look updated, it felt like them. The things in it felt like they belonged there.
And I think that was when something finally clicked for me.
Maybe all the “modern” updates weren’t actually what it took to make a house feel like home. Maybe the newest flooring, the most current paint color or replacing something because it looked dated wasn’t automatically going to give me the feeling I was chasing.
Because I wasn’t really trying to create an updated house. I was trying to create a home, and those aren’t necessarily the same thing.
That’s really what I’ve been trying to figure out ever since.
Four years later, our house still isn’t finished. There are projects we haven’t gotten to, things we’re saving for and plenty of places I still want to make warmer and cozier. But somewhere along the way, I realized I wasn’t actually chasing a finished house.
I wanted my house to feel like home.
And maybe that’s part of why I’m starting Keep the Couch before ours is “done.” Because I don’t think I’m the only one living in the middle of it.
Most of us are raising families, working, saving for projects, living with things we’d eventually like to change and trying to make our homes feel like ours in the meantime. We don’t have to wait until every floor is replaced, every room is decorated and every project is crossed off the list to love where we live.
And maybe making a home isn’t about getting to the point where there’s nothing left to change anyway. I’m certainly not there.
I’m still figuring out what deserves to stay, what really needs to change, and what can wait until the bigger picture comes together. But I finally understand what I’m actually trying to create.
Not the most updated house.
Not a finished house.
A home that feels like ours.