I found the coolest dolls ever. Why didn’t they have stuff like this when I was a kid??

You know when we first saw a picture of this house, The Green House, I said it was far too nice for us. I also said we were pushing the far end of the affordability envelope, too. But when we first came up for a visit, we drove by it anyway. “NICE house!” we said wistfully, thinking still that is was indeed far too nice and beyond us in all regards. Besides, what looked like a dinky lot turned out later to be a huge lot, just heavily treed.

And we have driven by it many times since, sometimes on purpose. We tried 3 different times to get in to see it, but all the appointments had to be moved or changed. Any other house we wanted to look at we always got right in to see. All the other houses we looked at need lots of work, some of them thousands of dollars over the years. Some of them for half the price of this house, but needing enough renovations we’d be spending at least this much anyway.

This house had renovations done six years ago. They hired an architect to redo the back porch one-story addition, which now holds a modern kitchen, half bath and laundry room. Apparently it cost them $60,000. Then they got divorced.

This house, as well as lots of others around here, has been on the market for a long time. The original asking price was in the “don’t even bother to think about it” range. It’s almost like the house waited for us.

Ron said this morning that there has been an astounding sequence of events that led us to here, where we are now. If Michele hadn’t needed a house-sitter, if we had never come up here (and my mother has lived here for at least 4 years and I hadn’t been up to see her), and even if Emma hadn’t been born, making it almost urgent for us to do something with the house we had – then, my friends, The Green House would not have been ours.

So technically, it’s not quite ours. There’s more papers to sign and initial and a minor thing about a mortgage, but still. The words “our new house” are starting to roll nicely off the tongue.

I know exactly where the Christmas tree is going. I know what rooms I’m leaving alone (for now), and what colors to paint the bedrooms. I now know exactly what pieces of furniture we need to replace becasue they don’t fit the look of the house. That would be most of them. We already now that we’re using the dining room with its original panelling as a living room, and the small living room for dining. The kitchen has a pantry cupboard exactly like my mother’s.

More importantly, I felt coming up here was also a sort of test. Was I really that messy, or was it truly the previous house, which I heaped blame on? Could I even handle a house as nice as the Green House? Two weeks after being here I knew we could. This house we’re sitting is reasonably clean and can be brought to ship-shape in less than an hour or two. I’m slowly turning into Martha, I think. (help!) When we seriously started to consider even the possibility that we just might be able to have The House, I lifted my eyes upwards. Honestly, I kid you not, God said to me, “I want you to have nice things. I want to give you nice things so you can tell people that I gave them to you.”

And I truly believe that this house has been given to us.