Home Hunting

Along with all the Wedding planning stuff, Teri and I are searching for our next home.  Our time in the "practice house" as we called it when we found it and took the stressful leap of faith to co-habitate together has gone past it's comfortable tenure and now we are in the market for a place we can settle into for the long haul.  The search is not without it's own stresses and challenges and, to be honest, if it weren't for some forces and folks beyond our control, we might have postponed the hunt a little longer.  But, alas, the time has definitely come!

We have had the grown-up conversations--buy? rent? lease? apartment? house? townhouse? what part of town? how many bedrooms? how much yard?We are selective, taking our time and processing some of our feelings around the move.  We each have different strengths when it comes to picking through the details and moving--even though we have both moved more than two dozen times in our adult lives.  We don't mind moving, but we have different approaches, skill sets and strengths.  We are both looking forward to getting settled in a new place; the possibilities and the unknowns--as Teri has said, she'd like to just fast-forward to the first of September and have all the parties and boxes and moving over with!

I can say that this house and home hunt feels completely different from our last one!  We know each other so much better and we have established our shared values around what is important and what is not.  We are Out and legal as a couple, our finances are commingled, we have shared in all the lessons of the practice house and we have some pretty clear ideas of what we want in our next incarnation. So, as we peruse neighborhoods and squeeze in phone calls and showings around all the other 2-week Wedding stuff we're doing, and we start to pack away unnecessary items in labeled boxes, there is a soup pot of emotions: excitement, anticipation, resentment, frustration, anger, fear, exhaustion, humor, skepticism, annoyance, gratitude, confidence, concern, hopefulness.  We divide up tasks and try to pay attention to both what needs to get done and how each of us works best.  And then, we get to take turns having the overwhelmed melt-downs that seem to be inevitable!

We are looking forward to kicking off our married life in a new place and shedding off some of the "old challenges" for the inevitable new ones.  Mostly, though, we are just trying to stay present in the process and keep focused on the temporariness of this period in our lives.  There is a whole new world on the other side of September!