I’m not moving.
“Um, okay. I didn’t think you were,” you might say. The funny thing is, as of a week ago this statement would have been a huge surprise to me. Because I had this idea, see.
Two weeks ago I woke up in the middle of the night and decided we needed to buy a new house. One bathroom for six people is too hard. Three bedrooms and no where to host guests? Impossible. Homeschooling four kids in 1200 sqft? Too close for comfort, especially when houses in Texas have no basements and we’re going on 17 weeks of it being too hot for the kids to spend much time outside.
Suddenly every tiny problem with our house was glaring at me. The chipped paint here, the broken tile there, the treacherous stairs leading to the backyard. A new house. We needed it. Let’s go.
I talked to my house guy–St. Joseph and asked for prayers for discernment. St. Joseph always, always has my back.
Daniel and I discussed the budget, the things we would need to find in a new house, the time frame for having our house ready to list. We talked to a realtor, looked at houses, met with a lender.
The only affordable 4 bedroom/2 bath houses are in the neighborhood where we live now with Victorian up to pre-WWII homes–many of which are being refurbished at the speed of light thanks to growth in Waco. But none of them were right.
Either there were clearly huge problems with the foundation or there was no way to install a dishwasher or there was old carpet that smelled like family of chainsmoking cats had been living there since 1970 or, my personal favorite, there was no way to enter the master bedroom unless you walked through, not one, but two of the other bedrooms. We spent a minute trying to imagine a way to make that work–put the kids to bed and then tiptoe past them to our room? Remain trapped in our room until the next morning when they woke up or wake the entire house on our way to make coffee? No good.
During this discouraging quest we also stayed up late talking about what we needed to do to get our house ready to show. That one spot in the sheetrock of the kitchen. Repainting the bathroom and the trim. Calling an electrician about that one light that won’t turn on. Reorganizing the kitchen for more space. Fixing the built-in doors so that they would finally shut properly and we could use them as book shelves next to the mantle.
Our realtor told us our house would sell within two weeks in this market. And we could see why. It’s a quiet street, we have good neighbors, a huge backyard, lots of character from the original 1924 touches, the original wood floors with all their weathered glory from the past 100 years, the pink tile in the bathroom that’s now on trend, a great layout that makes it feel much bigger than 1200 sq ft, the green cabinets I painted while heavily pregnant last summer, the fence Daniel built, the new windows we scrimped and saved for replacing the cheap 1960s window frames. The more we talked about it, the better it sounded.
After viewing what could have been a charming old 4/2 without the chainsmoking cat smell in the carpets and a visually assaulting tomato red kitchen, we walked through our front door into a house that doesn’t smell like cigarette infused carpet. We walked into my favorite room, our living room, with the portrait of Our Lady looking down over our home from above the mantle where we hang our stockings. I snuggled onto the couch to look around at our obscene number of bookshelves. I want to live in this charming house!, I thought. I really, really like it.
So we decided to stay right where we are and keep our low mortgage instead of stretching our budget. We’ll finish the attic to become a 4th bedroom and find some space to put in a second toilet and a sink. We’ll make home right where we are in all the goodness we had forgotten. Because it was enough all along.
You’d think after living in 650 sqft with NO flushing toilets, I would forever be enchanted by the space of 1200sqft and a real bathroom and never want a larger space.
You’d think after writing a book called The Grace of Enough, I would never be pursuing more more more. You’d be wrong. It’s a lesson I have to learn every day, over and over. Finding gratitude and contentment wherever God has planted me. The house, the life, the family–embracing it all with joy.
The funny thing is, after this whole little misadventure, I feel like I have a new house! That double lot backyard! A bedroom that does not require me to tiptoe past my children to make it inside. A house painted my favorite color of green by happenstance who knows by whom or how many years ago. The first curtains I’ve ever had in my married life that popped up in the Buy Nothing Group the other day (why did it take me so long to get curtains? Curtains>blinds).
I’m nothing short of thrilled to tenderly form this space into what our family needs, save up for the renovations that will make it work for us, and avoid the stress of selling and buying (showing a house while homeschooling almost broke me last time. In fact, it sent me spiraling into the worst flare up of autoimmune issues I’ve ever had. NO THANK YOU.)
We have been known to make some pretty wild and unconventional life changes in our time. There’s something to be said for that and I wouldn’t change any of them. But there’s also something to be said for staying put and learning to love right where you are. And while I was ready to jump in with both feet to a new adventure, St. Joseph’s intercession for discernment led me right back to my own front door. And he has never once led me astray.
As a Realtor, I LOVE this! Finding beauty and charm in your current home is always wonderful. Send me your layout and I’ll add on that half bath for you!
Everything you write is so beautiful and I love it all, but “a family of chain-smoking cats” made me laugh out loud, so hilarious.
YES. Since 1970. Yes.
Awesome!
Welcome home!
Such a good lesson to share in the era of Instagram perfect homes. I struggle with envy and comparing myself and our home to others when the reality is that we have a nice home with a mortgage we can afford, and I should be grateful. I too have been trying to spruce up and patiently turn this place into a home I feel content in. St. Joseph got us to this place too! He’s pretty good, that one. Blessings on you and your family!
Yep! Haley oooh been there and Will go there again I’m sure 🤣 we converted our attic into a fourth bedroom and saving for renovations. Our home is blue, my favourite colour and we have great neighbours! The farm girl in me craves the quiet and space but this is our place at the moment. Thanks for being real and sharing your insights. Love your reflections on the ordinary moments 💕
It’s like you took a page out of my life. We live in a less than perfect small town an hour from my husband’s work. I have looked and compared houses half a million times in the last two years but in the end we always decide to stay. Would a three bedroom house be more convenient with almost three children? Yes. Would it be nice to live close to his job? Absolutely. Would we live anywhere else? Nope. Nothing ever feels as right as where we currently live.
🙂
1200 sq feet is a lovely size! Glad you rediscovered it’s beauty! I love your green too!
I rediscover the beauty of my 1100sq ft house just about every year. We bought it when we had our 5th baby. There are 11 of us in here now. 3 bedroom and still only 1 bath, no basement or garage, it’d be nice if the backyard were larger, but it is fenced and the most wonderful playpen! And yes, we belong to the thousand book homeschool club! lol Thought we would move last year, but we decided this is too good to replace with a larger mortgage, a house that lacks all the comfy improvements we’ve made (including the new roof!), and a future that will have to include downsizing & moving yet again! Hang in there! Our littles will be big & gone too soon!
I feel like we are living somewhat parallel lives, ha! This is a regular struggle for me too… six people, small house, always dreaming about more space, but when I actually look at houses, it turns out we’d end up paying a lot more for places that have less character. We have a really sweet wooded backyard, a quiet street with neighbors we love… and the thought of getting our house ready to put on the market is daunting to say the least. I love where we live too—it’s easy to get to all the places I need/want to go, and it is close to where my children go for a part-time school/homeschool program. In my head and heart, I know this is where we should be, but there’s always that voice that is telling me it’s not enough. That because other people we socialize with have bigger, nicer houses, I shouldn’t invite anyone over here—it’s not good enough. How do you get that voice out of your head?
Lovely! The house we’re currently in is the first house we’ve owned. It’s 1400sqft, with four bedrooms and one bathroom. It’s more than plenty of space for us.
I was watching a new housing show based here in the Twin Cities where people who have one child and 1200sqft are just finding it “impossible” to live in their “tiny” homes. It made me glad that I can find beauty in our home, even if it is almost one hundred years old and has almost one hundred years of quirks.
I also get the occasional itch to find something better, but I’m learning to make “better” in the place we have. We are so incredibly fortunate.
It really is a blessing to be forced to make do sometimes. We like our apartment – 2br, 1ba, about the square footage size of your house, lots of storage (except in the tiny bedrooms), a good-enough kitchen, really charming old-fashioned touches… and we planned to be here for all of my husband’s 3-year residency when we moved in. We had been trying to conceive since before we moved in, and given how that was going, I figured we would maybe welcome one baby in those 3 years, but probably not one baby and then another, which I thought would be a bit much for the tiny bedrooms.
Lo and behold, right after our lease renewed for another year, we found out we were pregnant… and it’s twins! No getting out of this lease, so we are putting our energy into making our cozy apartment work for us! Swapping out furniture for pieces that use the space better, purging of things we don’t need, and most importantly adjusting our attitudes about it all! Sounds like we are going through similar make-do processes… and I must say, a finished attic bedroom sounds enchanting!!
Yes yes yes to all of this!! We’re a family of 6 in a 900 square foot house. We’re adding on another bedroom and bath & a half so we have a little more room to grow, but with all of the work we’ve had to do in our small fixer upper, there’s no way it makes sense for us to end up paying more long term for what we have now (once we fix THAT house up, etc). It forces us to spend time together, be intentional about what comes into our home, and frees up our finances a bit to pay forward others’ generosity towards us. I only wish we’d stop hearing others insist that our little house is “just a starter home” and once we grow up we’ll move on to something bigger and better. But “it’s not so bad to celebrate a simple life.” (Tolkien) …and this is as close as I’ll get to having a trendy tiny house 😉 Thank you for sharing this!
Haha….we thought we’d move within 2-5 years and have lived in our first house for 31! 1100 sq.ft, and we homeschooled our 5 and did group classes sometimes for another 10…..NOW the house works most of the time…EXCEPT when the whole family visits at the same time….Still would like to add on but probably won’t. I have a GREAT family with super daughters- and son-in-law….couldn’t be happier that God, who partners with St. Joseph, made it all work.
Oh how I love this! We have 1600 sq foot house. 4 tiny bedrooms and 1 bathroom.
I love it. Absolutely love it. It was built in 1880, and it’s right by the downtown and river in my charming suburban town.
And everyone tells us we should move bc one day we will have 4 teenage girls. They will want more space.
The thing is we adore our home. I love it’s old little quirks. I love that the poppies in the backyard were brought here during WW2 from a soldier coming back from Germany. I love that there’s a funky mud room on the way to our basement that I believe used to be an outdoor storm shelter. (Although truth be told, 5 years in and we are still trying to make that space usable.). I love the crown molding and the mismatched window trim that I can only guess we fixed up at one point. I love daydreaming about its story.
I live this house, and my kids love this house. And we get lots of togetherness bc it is tony 😉
Curtains are so very much better than blinds. We made the switch about 18 months ago and it was one of the most unexpectedly delightful house things we’ve ever done!
Your home is immensely charming! I’m glad you’re staying too! We’ve moved a lot in ten years of marriage. We have lived in a biggish apartment thinking we’d be there for the first couple of kids, a 1920s kit house similar to yours with zero to three children, a tiny apartment with three, a medium-sized house (by today’s standards), and now most recently a big house with #5 on the way. I find that we humans completely fill our houses no matter how big they are.
We made it work in that tiny apartment and we’ve generally been content with our space overall. But now even with five bedrooms I still want more bookshelves.
There’s a lot to be said for the value of the home you have made. This is a charming house in its own right, but it’s not ours fully yet. I haven’t done anything here except unpack boxes. I’ve left behind my gardens, all the fixing and painting, like you said everything that makes it reflect our family. Those are the things my kids say they miss about our old house as well. I’m so thankful we’re in the (un)intentional community of Pittsburgh for a good long time. The homeyness all will grow once I get some energy here. I certainly am sick of moving, but more importantly I think that stability encourages virtue. I’m reminded of another phrase from Tolkien, “the last homely house.”
All that to say, good move. Or not. (:
Haley!
Can you tell me where you got the beautiful print above your fireplace?
I have been following your blog for a long time – thank you for all your reflections!
Thanks for reading, Colleen! So the print is from Botticelli’s Madonna of the Magnificat and Daniel gave it to me for my 30th birthday but he can’t remember which site he ordered it from!
Thank you, Haley! I will look around for it, and thank you again for all your wonderful thoughts.
Well done. This resonated with me as my house is being inspected this moment. We’ve been on the market 6 months while homeschooling (feels liie at least 20 showings).We want to downsize. YES to all the little things screaming at me daily. Hello shower door that is hard to open, chipped paint concrete laundry room floor, yellow brass doorknobs, 90’s builder-grade cabinets… Thanks for sharing your home’s imperfections. It sometimes feels as though mine is the only one.
Wonderful! It can be very hard sometimes to see the “goodness” and “fitness” of what surrounds you every day. Thanks for the reminder!
I recently decided I didn’t like the high chair we used for my first child and wanted a new one for my second one. I planned to sell the one we have, so I cleaned it up really well. It is a 6 in 1 so I found all the pieces and took pictures of all the ways you can use it in order to post them in the listing. By the time I did all that, I was like “hey! This is actually a nice high chair, I’ll just keep it!.”
Reminds me of this post! 🙂
This. This resonates with me through and through. I was in the same spot a year ago- totally discontent with our 100+ year old farm on 40 acres. I wanted a new home, on the water. My husband and I would have had to give up any chance of me someday being a WAHM/SAHM to afford it, but I thought that that dream was impossible to attain anyway. Fast forward to today, after more prayer and patience, I’m home. We stayed in our farmhouse where our investments in livestock are finally allowing me to be here full time. I almost let it go… we almost didn’t make it here. I do sometimes still get frustrated with the quirks of a really old farmhouse, but its home. I cannot imagine us anywhere else!
What a beautiful post! I heard you speak at the WRM conference in MN in October. Loved your talk! I just finished your book The Grace of Enough and it is honestly the best book I have read in so long! I read at least ten books a month.😊 Thank you for all you have done to make a difference to mothers. I have eight children and have been homeschooling (living in MN now- moved alot for husbands job- finally “home” again!) for 13 years.
Could you please tell me what painting the picture of the coronation of Our Lady is from? Where did you find that print! We don’t have too much artwork and I would love to add that to our home. Slow decorating here also! God bless you Haley!
Thanks so much! The print was a gift for my 30th so I’m not sure where it’s from but it’s Botticelli’s Madonna of the Magnificat!