Our realtor had a photographer come to our old/current house today to take photos in preparation for our house being listed later this week and it brought home, perhaps more than any other step, that soon, the house we’ve called a home for fifteen years will likely soon no longer be ours.
As excited as we are to start another chapter of our lives in a new house, of course, we’re sad to leave this one behind.
Beyond the sentimental reasons of being the house where we raised our kids, had so many family milestones and even where we completed various renovations, there are some practical reasons I’m sad to leave our house behind.
In no particular order, here are five of them:
- “The Overhang”
This is a weird one but one side of our house has an overhang meaning that there’s a about a two foot covered portion along the side of the house that created a perfect spot for year-round storage of lawn chairs, toy boxes and more that was fairly sheltered from rain, snow and even sun. - “The Counter”
We have a fairly large downstairs bathroom that doubles as our laundry room and one project Shea’s dad completed for us was installing a counter over the the length of the (front load) washer and dryer which gave an incredible amount of space for folding laundry and just storing laundry baskets. Our new house has a laundry area but it doesn’t have nearly as much room as we had in our house so I’m not sure how we’ll fold and sort laundry. (Plus since our laundry room is downstairs in our current house and on the main floor of our new one, Sasha’s really worried because she can’t “throw my laundry over the rail to downstairs anymore!”) 🙂 - “The Step”
One of my dad’s contributions to our current house was to replace an aging front step. He was able to make it a bit narrower than our bulky/wide previous step, put on very nice rails and underneath created a perfect spot to store our garbage and recycling bins that we haul to the curb every week. Our new house has the bins behind a fence gate at the side of the house which is a lot less convenient than our current arrangement. - “The Storage Locker”
When we were looking for a house, one of the things that was an absolute “must” on our list was a garage. Unfortunately, we lacked the foresight (or possibly the funds) to make sure that garage was an *attached* garage. We bought a house with a detached garage that, because it was basically behind the house down a single car driveway, we rarely used – either because Shea and I couldn’t coordinate our leaving times for work or we’d risk having to shovel a long driveway in winter if we parked in it or, probably the main reason, we didn’t use it and will miss it – it basically became a huge storage shed with all kinds of toys, equipment including a lawn mower and snow blower, and tons of other crap (much of which we thankfully got rid of prepping for the move). Our new house has an attached garage and we’re really excited about actually parking inside going forward but we’re also nervous about losing a lot of the space we had for storage in our current garage. - “The Patio”
One of our earliest renos was having rubber paving put down on the patio stones along the side of our house opposite the driveway/garage. Combined with a new fence we put in a few years back, some strategic lighting and a propane barbecue, this area on the sunny south side of the house became our private sanctuary where we’d often have a drink after work, eat meals or sometimes just sit and read on a summer’s day.
I know that our new house will have many benefits (hmm, future blog post idea?) and unique features we don’t currently enjoy but it’ll be tough to try to replace some of the things we’re leaving behind as well. 🙁
