Living in the new house is something of an adventure--only the boys have anything approaching a finished room--but no one seems to be pining away for the old house, much to my surprise.
We all seem to be more interested in settling in to our new house, our only house, and making ourselves as comfortable as possible in the meanwhile. I think it's because we had been anticipating this for so long. We had the old house on the market for more than four years, planned the new house for more than three, and spent more than two years getting the new house from excavation to occupancy.
I would expect to be a bit disappointed after all that time to be living in a house that's still unfinished. But I'm not, and I don't think anyone else is either. Determined, is more like it. Determined not only to work toward finishing the house, but to make the house feel like a home even before it's a finished house.
And it's not as though it's a perfect house. We keep finding more things that the builders did badly. Not things that will keep us from living in the house, but things that require attention, like siding that's falling off, and a tub that won't quite fit right because the walls it's bewteen are not exactly the right distance apart, and a concrete floor that was poured badly. To name a few.
But it wasn't built as a dream house. It was built as an affordable house, relatively cheap to build and cheaper (compared with the old house) to heat. And on that score, so far, it has not let us down.
And even with open walls, unfinished floors, and boxes and furniture stacked all over the house, it already feels like home.
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