This blog post is part of a series that I began for telling our story. You can read the first post here.

Previous post

In yesterday’s post and a post from a couple of weeks ago, I alluded to how much we lived in our house. When we moved to Texas, we didn’t know that the house we purchased would be our home for longer than anywhere else we had lived as a married couple. We spent a year in an apartment during his last year of seminary (technically, it was about seven months that we lived together in that apartment, I had it for five as a single person). We then lived for two years in a house in a suburb of Buffalo, a giant five-bedroom where we shut off most of the extra rooms because we just didn’t need them. Then we bought our first home in a small town just south of Buffalo. It only had one bathroom and two bedrooms, but had a large living room, remodeled kitchen, and a former garage turned into a den on the front of the house. It was a fantastic pastor’s home, actually, because he could meet with folks who never had to enter the rest of the house.

Then we sold that house and bought a different house in town. In hindsight this was not the best idea, but we wanted to save some money on housing costs and our mortgage was pretty terrible. Perhaps refinancing would have been better, but it was a learning experience. The second house was a cute little cottage with a bumped-out roof to create an upstairs bedroom.

Each home we’ve lived in has had features I’ve loved. The apartment had huge windows and hardwood floors. The giant house had a screened-in porch. The den off the front of the first house we bought had tons of built-in bookcases. The master bedroom in the cottage was my favorite of any house where we’ve lived.

Our townhome in Ohio was new and bright, but honestly, lacked character. I think I miss it the least of any home we’ve had. Then we moved to Texas and bought our quirky golf-course adjacent house, with a layout that seemed to suit us perfectly through several different phases of life…

Next post coming tomorrow.