Finding Our Home, Finding My Peace

I’ll never forget the day Nathan came home and decided with no great flourish or drama that we were about to start house hunting. “This house is too small for us. I can’t deal with one bathroom. Here,” he said as he flung a stack of real estate listings on the bed, “see where you want to start looking and we will call the showing agents.”

Now. If you’ve been reading my blogs for any length of time you know something about me. I have this whole wide world in my head that has little to nothing to do with what is actually happening here in reality. And in that world, our house hunt was going to look a lot like an HGTV show. Much like the Internet, I assumed you can’t put anything on the TV that isn’t true. I also assumed that we would have a house in a matter of moments and life would move forward while I sipped coffee with great leisure and ease.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA.

House number one was a beautiful farmhouse in the historic section of Powell. Once the town’s first post office, we could still see the windows on one of the outbuildings etched with postal information. What we didn’t see was $35,000 worth of abatement issues linked to asbestos that had traveled throughout the entire home via the HVAC system for years. We got out of our contract and continued the search.

One would think that I would be terrified of older homes at this point, considering we had already hired a contractor and a team of sub-contractors, drawn up plans to knock out a wall and extend the back porch, and had began collecting materials samples. One would be incorrect.

After a few run-ins with listings that didn’t make sense and houses that were spades different in person than what they looked like in pictures, we hired a realtor. “What type of house are you looking for?” She asked. (Here comes the part where I’m thankful that Page was my friend who happened to be a real estate agent, because anyone else would have heard my list and said “K, bye,” never to show us a property again).

“Well. I want an older home. Preferably built in the 1940s or before. Four bedrooms with an office or a 5th bedroom to be used as an office. Hardwoods and tile, no carpet. Stainless appliances and granite countertops. A claw foot bathtub. At least two bathrooms. A finished or partially finished basement. All the kids’ rooms on one level, master on separate level. An ensuite bathroom for the master. Laundry on the main floor. A huge covered porch. It needs to be located in South Knoxville, Seymour, Holston Hills, or Fountain City. Bonus points for a big yard, French doors, open or semi-open concept, and a garage or storage building on site. We would like it to be move-in ready or close to it. And if renovations have been done, they need to be in the same period or theme of the time the house was built. All for under $175,000.”

Are you guys dead yet? Because I almost was. Two more failed inspections yielded two more broken contracts. One for, as the inspector said, “the second worse case of untreated termite damage” he had ever seen. Another for a finished basement with no heat and air installed which had led to mold growth that the owners refused to acknowledge. This wasn’t like HGTV. It was more like a horror movie marathon.

And then. We found it.

Actually my aunt found it via Facebook.

After months and months of Page and I touring disasters that led me to say things like “I really think someone was murdered in this basement,” we struck gold.

It was a listing for a beautiful white craftsman house that checked off nearly all of my insane boxes. It was a flip, but it had been flipped by my mom’s childhood best friend and her husband. The listing hadn’t formally gone on the market yet, but the next day we would be the first showing. That was a Tuesday. We were under contract by Saturday. I held my breath for weeks and weeks while I waited for the inspector to find that the foundation was actually made from Lincoln Logs or that the portal to Hell was in the basement. But everything came out fine and on the weekend of Valentine’s Day 2016 we moved into our dream house.

Six months later and I want to tell you, our whole entire lives have changed. We have moved to Utopia. One house down from the park, directly across the street from the library, and surrounded by the most amazing neighbors. The Neighborhood Babies, aka The Baby Gang (a group of 8-10 kids from a combined four houses), roam from house to house in our little row of homes and create forts, play in sprinklers, collect sticks, and jump on trampolines. 90% of the time, I’m unsure of the exact number of kids in our house. We never have food for longer than a few days. My kids have never been happier.

I have never felt more calm.

I used to yell. A lot. I was a yeller through and through. We had a menu. We had a schedule. We had lists and we adhered to them. People compared me to Monica Gellar on Friends. I thought that’s just who I was. “I’m tightly wound,” I would tell my others. Then we moved into this amazing house I have always dreamed of, with neighbors who feel like lifelong best friends…

And I realized there’s not really a way to maintain order when eight kids are chasing the ice cream man around the block, or using your down comforter as a canopy for their stick fort. I can’t plan a menu when kids are dropping in and out asking what’s for dinner with frequency but no real regularity. I can’t schedule rigidly when there are six kids, boys and girls, buddies who have basically turned into siblings, in one bedroom eating popcorn and telling ghost stories until midnight. I can’t yell when I sit on the sidewalk and watch The Baby Gang getting know every kid at the park and getting to know every dog on a walk with their owners.

I can’t yell when I watch the love of my life come home and fly his drone at the librarians leaving for the day across the street as they laugh and offer to come over after work sometime soon, bringing wine and cigars. I stopped sweating the small stuff when I realized I live in the type of place where I can go ask my neighbor for two cups of milk and my other neighbor borrows two eggs for a cake she’s making.

If you follow me on social media you know that most of my pictures these days are of barefoot, half dressed kids, filthy from head to toe and happily exhausted. You’ll see my porch which has become the most used “room” of our house. You’ll see flowers and books and dogs and Nathan and I enjoying how close we are to amazing food and breweries and front steps that have become the anchor of the neighborhood, all followed by the hashtag #thesummerweallturnedferral. Because that’s pretty much the most accurate way to describe our lives right now.

For years and years I imagined what it would be like to live in one of “those” houses. The ones you walk into and feel immediately at home. The ones you drive by in the historic neighborhoods and imagine what the people are like inside them. I think my newfound peace has come from realizing I am so lucky to have this house, these neighbors, and the man who let me have my dream house even if it nearly cost us our sanity in the process.

We bought a house, yes. But what came with it in the form of things not found in any real estate listing have made it a home.

Also…That tub though.