Continuous Quality Improvement

Lately I've been trying to figure out what's with my bad attitude toward our house and its environs. Other than, you know, winter, which last I checked happened at our old place, too.

I have a lot of theories, but one of my prime theories at the moment is this: in the past, every move we've made has been an upgrade.

It helped that we started out life together living in a pickup truck:














(In answer to your question, Have you always been a dork? Apparently so.)

So pretty much all the crappy student apartments after that were a step up (there was indoor sanitation! electricity! tables! For MANY YEARS I was grateful simply to have a flat surface on which to lay out my solitaire game.)

Then came our first house:

I remember it being horribly stressful to buy, and it was kind of a wreck, but it was also cute and it was ours. No more landlords! We'd thrown off the shackles of The Man! Etc.

If the neighborhood we lived in was a little loud, and there were regular raids of the neighboring apartments by the local swat team, well--that was okay. It was REAL. It wasn't until Silas was born that we started to think that maybe we wanted something a little more genteel.

Moving from there to our second house was definitely a step up. There were two bathrooms! The basement was not half dirt! And, it had an absolutely gorgeous yard to which the current yard just can't compare. At least not yet.


Nice, huh? I start missing it all over again when I look at these photos. I start remembering our first night there, when everything was still in boxes and Silas was sleeping on our bedroom floor because his room wasn't set up yet. It was raining, and we had the windows open, and for the first time in five years we could actually HEAR the rain, because we didn't have the fan on to block the noise of cars peeling out of the alley outside our window.

Now, our new house is fine. It's not even really a downgrade: it has more bathrooms, more square feet, and APPARENTLY a better location because it cost a whole chunk of a lot more.

However, it is a downgrade in a lot of minor, personal ways. The kitchen is smaller and the cabinets are crummier. The yard is not as nice (although I'm working on that). The garage is smaller. I don't have a study (technically, however, this would have happened at the old place, since Si and Helen couldn't really share a bedroom forever.) The floor plan is a little less open. It's just...less. In a lot of sort of unquantifiable ways.

BUT. It is a nice house. I keep telling myself that once we've lived in it for two or three years, and made it more our own, I will love it. I may even love it MORE for having had to work at it.