Playing Catch-Up

Well, it's been a few months since we purchased our first home, which we lovingly call the Little Red House.  I first found this house almost two years ago on a realtor website.  It took me five months to convince Justin to go out and have a look at it - upon said visit we spotted a herd of deer, and he was hooked.  A month later and our real estate agent was showing us inside the house for the first time.  It smelled old and fussy, having been uninhabited for so long.  Almost every inch of the walls were covered in either fading wallpaper or some kind of panelling.  And of course, the cherry on top was the trailer park that butted up to the property and the rock quarry down the road.  Not to mention the price was a little out of our full-time student range (cough).

Of course we were in love.

Our friends thought we were insane.  Our families ignored us.  But we persisted quietly, taking weekly trips out to visit the house we wished would one day be our home (how about that assonance?).  That went on for about a year.  We watched the little red house morph before our eyes, the scenery changing with the seasons.  We waited and waited for the day when we would drive by and the For Sale sign would be missing.  It would crush us, we knew, but still we waited for the inevitable.  Surely a little slice of heaven like this place would sell quickly and for a high price.  Over a year later, we were still making our trips out, going slowly down the long winding driveway, windows down.  We'd park, get out, and walk around the house, all the while oohing and ahhing, pressing noses to windows and dreaming of life in the little red house.  After about 20 minutes, we'd sigh and return to the car, saying to each other, "One day we're gonna buy this house."  That was our routine. 

The price continued to drop, and it looked like Justin was going to get the job he'd been hoping for.  We got all of our finances in order and decided to go for it.  Aftert a month of excruciating back and forth negotiations, we got the call we'd been praying for:  the little red house would be ours.  Another month of paperwork later and after signing away our lives and our first born, we were given the keys and even a garage 'clicker'.  The weekend after Thanksgiving we started moving in, and by the end of that week we were sleeping in our new house, albeit on our mattress on the floor in the den.  Even now, every time we drive up to the house together, we look at each other and say, "One day we're gonna buy this house."  And then we smile and turn the key. 

This is the story of the little red house.  This is the story of making a house into a home.