my cold feet

The house we bought is a nice rambler in Bellevue with a great view. (insert view picture) The people who had lived in the house prior to us were a nice couple who had lived there for 30 years or so. They’d updated it about 15 or 20 years before, and kept it in meticulous condition. We were looking for a house with a LOT of sun, and ideally, a view. We found our house, and it has a VIEW. And a TON of sun. (Also wind, but that is another story.) So, while the interior needed a lot of changing to bring it up to “new” standards, the bones were great, and it was very livable.

I remember standing in the kitchen for the first time and thinking that the house had huge possibilities. All the rooms that mattered have a view and a couple had access to the deck. I thought – “if we just knock down that one wall, and move the refrigerator to the left, the kitchen would be great!” That was what got me hooked. We continued home shopping, but kept coming back to this one. Finally, we said, “ok, we’ll buy it, upgrade it and live in it for 15 years until we enter the next phase of our lives.”

We moved in right before Thanksgiving. My job was really stressful and my father was very ill. So during the holidays, and probably the first half of the next year, I wasn’t really able to think much about what I wanted to do with the house. In fact, when we first moved in, I hated the house and wanted to move back to our old place. It was early winter, the days were short, the new house was always dark, and the stress of moving during the holidays made me just want to “go home”.

I remember really clearly the first nice spring evening when my husband & I had our first glass of wine outside on our deck while the sun was setting. I suddenly had a wonderful vision and remembered why we’d bought the house, what our dream about it was, and how this would be our haven for a number of years.