So Gwen Bell is doing this thing. Where a huge variety of people reflect on their year. I think it’s a fabulous idea to reflect on the previous year before starting the new one, so I’ll be participating when a particular prompt speaks to me.
Today’s prompt: What’s the best change you made to the place you live?
My answer is twofold:
#1: We moved to Austin. To be honest, this made a lot of stuff pretty fucking rough for us. The last six months have been an absolutely insane roller-coaster. If we had waited another year, saved up more money, it would have been a much easier transition. But I wouldn’t change it for the world; we’ve learned a lot. And a lot about each other too. You want to test a two month old marriage? Put both people in an extremely high-stress, low-money situation where neither of you have any friends because you just moved ten hours away from everyone you know. Yeah. That’ll do it.
We came out okay, though, and knowing that we can get through something like that is extremely reassuring.
#2: I started treating our house like a home. The house we lived in before, we started renting in August of ’08, and we knew we were planning on moving the next summer. Shit you not, we still had things we hadn’t totally unpacked when we moved. I kept thinking “Oh, we’re just going to move in a few months, why bother decorating/buying nice things for the house/dragging out those boxes/etc.?”. The result was that I hated the way the house looked and I didn’t like having people over. To be fair, it wasn’t that great of a house in the first place (it was a bit of a fixer upper; we figured we could put the money we’d be saving on rent into our moving fund). But still, I learned my lesson: everything is totally unpacked here and I put my best efforts into decorating with limited funds, even though we’ll be in this house a year at most. Life is too short, I can’t afford to plan for the house we’ll have in six months, I’ve got to use the house we have now and make it a place that I’m happy to be in.
So, what’s YOUR answer? Did you move? Redecorate? Put in a new bathroom? I want to hear, please do tell!
