When I started to think about the story of our big, little move I realized I kept out a few parts of the story that add elements of hilarity to the situation, so allow me to back up a few years.
If you can recall, we’ve been on a bit of a purge (you can read about the journey here and here). When I was pregnant with the twins we had to reorganize and make room for them and this involved switching rooms with Thad, and part of the process was purging much as possible. Coincidentally, Mr. M found minimalism during his 3-hour commute to and from the City and would forward countless blog posts on the topic and this helped with our purging efforts. Somewhere along the way all this talk about owning less resonated with me. Deeply. So much so that the end result took us both by surprise.
You see… I bought a little house.
Well, we did but Mr. M didn’t actually see it until after we were in contract. A week after we were in contract, to be exact. A contract that would close in a mere 18 days.
Going back to my rant about the absurdness of the current real estate market, I was was completely determined to get a deal and would do just about anything. Which means our little family of five will be squeezing into an 800 square foot, 1 bedroom, 1 bath house (second awesome fact).
When I started to get aggressive and narrow in on the neighborhood of choice, I totally overlooked this house when it was listed because of the size and the bedroom situation. However, it has a sleeping loft. Which means that Mr. M and I can sleep in the loft on our king mattress (and there’s still room for a book shelf for storage) while the boys take the bedroom. The house doesn’t have a dining room so we’ll just eat around a big enough coffee table on cushions and pretend we are glamping. It will be fun! And in another year or two, we’ll hopefully be able to add on (but not too much!) and if for whatever reason we can’t due to building constraints (or drought constraints), then we can turn it into something like this (note the sleeping loft!!!)
Sure, I may have gotten a little too creative with the plan, but the boys are young and they’re still little (though Kai is weighing as much as Thad now… go figure).
Yesterday as I cleaned the house while the boys were napping, I started to think about all the time I’d have with less house to clean and less stuff to organize, and I got excited. I will have time. And if time were a measure of wealth, then I will be richer than ever before and I can’t wait.
So thank you, Gus, for letting us buy your little cottage in the big City. And thank you, dear friends for cheering us on during this whole crazy process.
And thank you, Claire for such a wonderful reminder!
