The house does not make the home
Friday, March 28, 2008A good friend warned us that moving is rated as one of the 
most stressful moments in life, ranking right up there with getting married or having a baby, but we have to disagree. We think that's a deplorable understatement - moving seems way more stressful than marriage and childbirth combined. It could be the monetary strain, or the physical one, or maybe it's the act of condensing one's whole life into boxes 
and hoping it makes the transition in tact, but we think it goes even beyond that. We think it's less the act of moving and more the process of being between homes that elevates the stress level so greatly. With our old house, once familiar and comfortable as an old shoe, now stripped bare and left for the taking, the new house has become our family base. But we are not yet familiar with the sights, sounds, or smells of the new house, and in some ways our first week here has felt a little displacing, like being on vacation and expecting go home any day now. Glimpsing our possessions settled into their new arrangements has been unsettling as well - familiar but in the wrong 
context, like seeing a face at church that you had previously known only at work. We truly love our new house - we love the layout, the colors, the deck, the neighborhood, the location - but it will take some time for it to fully become our home. In the meanwhile we find ourselves marveling at and enjoying the new (the open kitchen, the larger bedrooms, the wood floors), but clinging to the old (the dogs and cats in 
the same old sunshine, our usual coffee in our usual mugs, Calvin's same toys on the same shelves, and hey - we painted his new bedroom to match the old) while we go through the seemingly unending process of unpacking our familiars. We'll know we've come to an end point when Calvin no longer exclaims "new house" whenever we pull into the driveway.
More pictures in the New House Process alubm.
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