We are back in an apartment.
Daniel and I have lived in many types of homes over the course of our married life. The first was a gorgeous one-bedroom garden cottage with Terracotta tiled floors nestled in someone’s backyard in Hilton, SA. The next was half of a ranch house that the owner had sectioned off and made into a two-bedroom home. This happened to be next-door to the house that I grew up in, and I had my dad for a neighbor! I’m not kidding when I say we passed food over the fence when we ran out. Out of baking flour, no problem! The third was a two-bedroom duplex/townhouse in Durban, where we almost melted away at night with no air-conditioning unit. Then there was the studio in South Korea, the farm cottage back in SA, a basement in Matthews, NC, and then finally our first apartment at Colonial Village at Matthews.
We loved moving around but were really ready, or so we thought, to buy a house and ‘settle’ down. So we did. We bought a house in Charlotte near my mom and step-dad and thought we would be there for years. It’s funny how we make so many plans for ourselves.
“New Home shoot” by Rachel Hendrick Photography
It was a great house. It had a great entertaining area outside with a hot tub and a beautiful view that backed up to the tennis courts. I could be there in under a minute when we had 7am clinics on a Saturday morning. Every second counted!
We had always talked about wanting to start a family someday and knew having children was something we both wanted. After almost 9 years of life with my amazing man, Daniel was ready to have a mini-me. Or a mini-him 😉 I wasn’t quite ready and it was tough navigating that space for a while but something inside me changed and I quit my teaching job so we could start trying when ever we wanted to, and my body and mind would be more ready. I also decided then that it was a priority of mine to raise my own child. The next thing you know we were expecting and the far-in-the-future plans came knocking on our door.
We looked at our budget and there was no way that we could live comfortably on one salary in our big house. We didn’t think about that going into a home purchase with two full-time salaries. So, we had a couple of decisions to make:
Work part-time and pay for a nanny/daycare part-time.
Work full time and pay for a nanny/daycare full-time.
Get people to rent the rooms upstairs (our master was on the main floor).
Sell the house and move into something that we can manage on one salary.
We decided to sell our house and move back into an apartment. My brother said we were moving backwards and he was right in a way, but we just knew it was right for us.
Moving day!
As I sit here in the apartment that has less natural light than a cave, of course I think about the windows as high as the roof in our old house, flooding the living room with a gorgeous soft light. Of course I remember how quiet it was without the people upstairs tromping to-and-fro every second of the day. What are they doing up there? Zumba, bowling, running on the spot just to raise my blood pressure?
But – I also think about our precious baby growing and kicking in my tummy and can’t wait to pour my love and time into him/her, for as long as I can. We don’t know what’s next, and what other changes we will make along the way, but we are both confident that this was a great move for us.
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