Twas Brillig

“The greatest thing in this world is not so much where we are, but in what direction we are moving.” - Oliver Wendell Homes

For the last five months, we’ve been building a house. And not just any house–our dream house. How I have loved this house. I have poured over every detail and lovingly handpicked everything from carpet to cabinets to hardware to light fixtures. It will be complete in ten days.

And yesterday, we walked away from it.

It almost hurts to say it out loud! I still can hardly believe it!

The reason that we’re giving our builder: Our old house hasn’t sold yet. We haven’t had one person express the least bit of interest in it and we’ve dropped the price as low as we can possibly go. So the builder can keep our earnest money and sell our dream home to the next customer.

All of that is true, but it’s not the reason that we’re walking away. We knew that our house might not sell, and so we’ve been saving our money accordingly. We really won’t have any trouble carrying two mortgages for a while (But sheesh, who wants to carry two mortgages!? What a waste!!!) But the real reason is that as we were preparing to put all that money down on the new house (the down payment needed to be deposited yesterday), our gut said no. Somehow and for some reason, this is not what we are supposed to be doing right now. It’s that unmistakable gut wrenching that you just can’t ignore–and you just have to obey. It’s scary and bewildering, but ever since we decided to follow our gut, we have been at peace.

So what now? We are certainly not going back to our old house. We both feel completely and totally DONE with it and the neighborhood. It wasn’t a bad house and it wasn’t a bad neighborhood, it just isn’t right for us anymore.

And so we’re scouring the internet and the real estate world and spending all our time going through houses and neighborhoods, searching our guts to discover “is this the right one?” And in the meantime, I’m sitting here in the basement of my in-law’s house with no end in sight. (My in-laws have been AMAZINGLY gracious. I can’t even begin to tell you how wonderful they’ve been. Still, I’m ready to be matron of my own home and chef in my own kitchen and so on. And wouldn’t it be cool to have a place for all my junk?)

But finally, I’m at peace. The right thing for us is going to come along. And I just know that I’ll be so glad I waited.