goodbye, home

The temperature dropped below zero outside as we closed the door to our old home, and began a new season in our lives. We moved into our townhouse in 2008 when I was 37 weeks pregnant with Lady M, about to begin our parenting adventure. I spent hours waddling through Home Depot as we prepared the house for our new arrival. A couple of weeks ago we had her 7th birthday party at the house, and then began to pack our lives away in preparation for our move.

It's funny the amount of memories that linger in a home. Seven years may not seem like a terribly long time, but we've seen a lot of firsts in that house, and it's shaped many of our memories as a family of four.

We brought both of our girls home from the hospital to that house and watched them begin to crawl and take their first steps in the hallways. We must have walked six thousand laps around the kitchen island while trying to soothe the babies back to sleep. We've bandaged scraped knees, had thousands of family meals together, ridden bikes, drawn countless chalk pictures on the driveway and snuggled up for many family movie nights. We've celebrated 25 birthdays there, spent seven Christmases decorating, baking and celebrating.

Thinking back on all of this started to make me a little emotional as we gathered up the last of our things. Thankfully, we squeezed in a final visit to our first home, complete with a moving box picnic dinner and an impromptu dance party in our bare living room. After that, we shut the door for the last time. 

I know that our new home will provide the setting for new memories, and the ones we've created in our townhome will always be special.

Thankfully, the new house we're now settling into is just what we all wanted. After a long journey to find it we are thrilled to be in our new town, closer to the girls' schools and in a lovely neighbourhood with a lot more space to play.

Paramount Drive will always be a special part of our lives, but we're all excited to shape new experiences, make new memories and ride our bikes on a brand new street.

lessons in moving

We started looking for a new house around the time that hieroglyphics were becoming obsolete. It's been a long haul. Why, you may ask? Well I'll tell you.

First of all, Cal and I had two very different dream homes in mind:

Kristin's dream home: a newer house, mud room for all of the damn boots and shoes that are strewn about my front entrance, move-in ready, large kitchen, space for entertaining, fence for the dog, pretty kitchen, no renovations required. Easy, right?!

Well, then there's this:

Cal's dream home: significant acreage, space for guitars and other musical goodness, fence for the dog, separate family room, hot tub, happy to complete renovations.

Hmm. Slightly different. To summarize, we were on different pages of the MLS. 

Knowing each other's housing wants, we spent a lot of time looking for some kind of mystical home that combined all of these elements, and we spent plenty of time viewing houses that were better suited to his wants, and ones that were better suited to mine. At times we considered whether buying two houses and working between them both might be the better solution! But, with each new showing and open house we attended the end result was always the same: not quite what we wanted. And the months of searching kept flying by...

Fast-forward somewhere between 18 months and 2 years: we went to see a house that seemed to fit the bill. Having clearly identified our shared wants, and somehow finding common ground over time, we found the house that was right for us. On a Saturday morning we viewed the house at 11:00am, wrote the offer at 1:30pm, presented it in competition at 3:30pm, and won it shortly after 4:00pm at which point we signed the papers on the hood of our real estate agent's car. Whew! After a couple years of house hunting, we had a new house in 5 short hours!

But there's just one little thing that remained...selling our current house...and before that, prepping it. You see, we have our lovely 10-year-old dog, Dakota:

She looks sweet, right? Well she is...but she's also taken a little toll on our house over the 7 years we've been here. So with our listing date upcoming, we shipped her off to my parents for a few weeks so we could complete the few little restoration projects that she created for us in the house. We also took on a number of other small projects to finish beautifying the house and have learned a few things along the way...

• Re-screening doors has become a new forte for Cal and I! Those damn things are annoying, but with the right tools (thanks Rona!) and some patience, our screen door (previously ripped by Dakota's determination to get into the backyard one afternoon) looks fabulous! 
• The laundry never stops. Now this is not really a new revelation, but how is one ever supposed to stop doing laundry long enough so that the house can remain looking like a museum for those coming to see it? 
• My sweet children are so patient, and are hopefully developing lifelong habits of tidiness seeing as they must pick up every toy, marker, hair elastic and morsel of food that finds itself out of it's 'proper' place. Lady M commented the other day "I don't like bossy mummy"...apparently I've been a bit, shall we say, directive lately. I like to think I'm just demonstrating varied types of leadership for them in an effort to help them build up their own repertoire of leadership skills. That's just good parenting, wouldn't you say? 
• Running around the house in the morning chopping pillows, folding toilet paper edges, and picking up stray hair elastics does not help me in being on time for work each day! 
• Though all four of us enjoy home reno shows (with Property Brothers, Love it or List It and Flip or Flop being some of our faves), and Lady M regularly makes comments such as "it's okay, we can just reno it", we are not going to get into the business of home flipping any time soon. 

Although we've put in a lot of late nights, plenty of elbow grease, and I may have upped my bossiness leadership quotient a little bit lately, the end result when we move to our new home will be well worth it. And not having to look for houses anymore is the best pay-off of all! 

a pile of clothes

In most aspects of my life I'm a very tidy person. I've always had impeccable school notes; even in university I had well-placed, tidy doodles neatly taking up every empty space in the margins. My office space is immaculate, everything in its place and it's regularly swiped with the lavender-scented antibacterial wipes I keep in my overhead cabinet, always within arms reach.

So, why is it that I always have a pile of clothes beside my bed?

Growing up, I always had clothes on my bedroom floor, and my parents were forever after me to tidy it up. In university, that same pile followed me to each of my apartments...and the darn thing has followed me into my adult life too! The whole bedroom can be clean, but (much to my husband's chagrin) there, to the right side of the bed, he can almost always count on the ever-present mound of varied fabrics. At least I'm consistent!

Tonight I spent three hours cleaning the house...I did some work on each floor, but the greatest part of tonight's cleaning adventure was spent on the top floor, in my room, on the right side of the bed, hanging everything up...again.

My mum has reminded me that I'm now modeling this behaviour to my daughter...am I really setting her up to have a pile beside her bed for several decades of her life? I sure hope not. Thankfully, so far she has a propensity towards tidying and cleanliness...let's hope she gets my academic and professional tidyness and applies it to her room when the time comes.