Buying Our First Home
Paul and I were living in Vancouver, British Columbia when we decided that we wanted to be able to actually afford a house where our kids would have room to run, play and destroy. If you don’t know already, Vancouver is the most expensive place to live in North America so for obvious reasons we decided it was time to move. So, we asked Paul’s parents to help us out and together over a very blurry Facetime session purchased a house unseen to us except for on the blurry screen. I know what your thinking… it sounds like a terrible idea. Regardless, Paul and I came out to see it weeks later and fell in love with it. In my mind it was move in ready, so beautiful compared to the one level townhouse we were living in with mold growing in the crawl space, and we couldn’t wait to move in.
I’ll never forget the feeling of leaving my parents in Vancouver behind and taking our 18 month old son with us to another city. But we knew this was the right thing for our little family which we were hoping to grow once we got settled in the new house. We arrived at the house (my husband moved a week before me with the truck) and I walked in to a house of boxes ready for a brand new chapter for us! As I started to unpack and put things where I had dreamed of them going, things started to change. Suddenly I saw the house for what it was, dark, and knowing what my anxiety would do in a dark space (stay tuned for a post on that topic) I knew we had some painting to do. Well… the rest is history!
From that moment on it has been a never-ending list of changes and fun projects (well… fun for me anyway) and we’ve changed this house pretty much from top to bottom. And still even though a lot has been done I still have dreams of changes in our future. We never did anything drastic like tear down walls or rip up carpet, but we did develop the basement so the kids had a destruction room and wouldn’t hurt the rest of my house, and a room for the grandparents to stay in as much as they wanted. Otherwise, all of the changes are cosmetic and we have changed this house from a dark dungeon to a welcoming bright happy home.
Decorating and improving this house sparked my desire to decorate and start schooling for interior design; although we’ve made changes many times to this house it has been my first project and the one I love the most. I will do another blog post about the details of the home so hold tight and stay tuned!