Hello House, It's Nice to Meet You

We are finally starting to settle into our house and it really feels like home to me now. It is so funny that even though we worked on the house for months before we moved in, it still didn’t feel like our home. When we first bought it there was the period of discovering things the previous owners had left. The weird sheet in the cupboard under the stairs, the child’s writing on the back of the door, and even the stopped up tub. The house belonged to us, but those things weren’t ours. Through the months of remodeling, those things went away, but we were constantly discovering things about our house and its previous owners through our efforts. As I scrapped the layers and layers of wallpaper from the walls, I could imagine what the house looked like for all of the people who had lived there before us. To me, that stuff was a royal pain, but to them it was something that made the house their home. Now we have those things. I am so proud of the repainted fireplace, the colors I picked out and the new faucet where I was my dishes. All those things belong to me, and so does the house. Even though it felt like ours finally, it was still a stranger. Over the last few months I have gotten to know our house and it now holds many memories for us. It is the place where we had our first Valentines Day dinner and where I cooked dinner for my Grandfather for the first time, not mention the countless little everyday things that make our life together so wonderful. I am just as happy to see the handprint on the wall David left when he helped us move in and the nail sticking out of the one creaky step for the millionth time as I am the fresh clean paint and new fixtures. We have started to make our mark on the place with the help of those we love. I am so grateful for our home and the memories and life we have begun to build inside it.