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| Image via Lost Bumblebee |
When we moved out of the only home our kids have ever known and into a house they have only seen once, I knew we had our work cut out for us. At first the excitement helped carry them through the empty rooms with paint they hated. But that only works for a couple of weeks at best!
We had lived in our little old house for 10 years, but ironically we had only started doing anything to make it feel like home while we were prepping to sell. It was only ever meant to be a temporary home, a place to bring home our first child (whom I was pregnant with at the time). We did not want to live there more then 5 years. Within a year, the economy crashed and with it our hope of ever moving. We never really loved that house and didn't put much effort into making it feel like a home. Don't get me wrong, we filled it with our belongings and hung a few things on the wall. But, we never painted walls that we hated or hung family photos up. It just felt like something between a temporary rental and a weight dragging us down. It was almost 30 years old when we moved in and needed a lot more work then we realized at the time. The backyard was small, yet someone had managed to get an in ground pool in there that took up most of the yard. It was only usable a small amount of the time we lived there. It was more a dangerous pit for our children and took up their only usable space to play. The front yard was full of trees that quickly became over grown and stopped grass from growing in most of the yard. The AC needed freon added every other year to keep it even at 80 inside in the hot summers. The covering out back fell apart, a toilet flooded a good part of our house, and the roof needed replacing. It quickly became cramped and just didn't serve our family well.
10 years and four kids later, our city had recovered from the crash and was having it's own little housing boom. We realized we could finally leave that house and it was a VERY happy day! We found a much bigger, much newer house with a big back yard a few towns over. It is easy to think that we would be so excited to be here that it would just feel like home on it's own! Ha! Nope!
While we love this house, I definitely noticed a disconnect even in myself because it WASN'T home! As much as we loathed the old house, it was a constant for many years. So I sat down and thought about what made me feel at home. Seeing my favorite color (turquoise!), smelling familiar smells, and knowing what light switches go where! So here is what we did to help make it feel more like home.
