Home Sweet Home

Our time on Jacqueline is drawing to an end and while we're excited to start the next chapter in our lives, it's also a sad time for us … especially me … because I'm an overly emotional, highly sensitive sap. (Seriously, I can get choked up leaving a hotel room.)

All emotions aside, our house has been a great house. We've put a lot of work into it over the years and it's rewarded us with a bone-dry basement, a rock-solid foundation and an invisible no-vacancy sign for any wayward rodent to see.

Carrie and I bought the house before we were ever even married and I honestly believe it brought us closer together and probably sped up the inevitable—which after 10 years was quite a feat. The first night we officially became homeowners, we (Carrie, Zoe and I) slept on the living room floor on a pile of blankets and played with Zoe's glow ball in the empty, pitch-black basement. The house wasn't perfect, but we knew we could make it our own. For months we lived with my parents while working on it every night after work, sometimes until two or three in the morning. We didn't really know what we were doing, but we figured it out by trial and error, with a major emphasis on the error. Most nights, it was just the two of us, a can of paint and Willie Nelson. Over time, the gold-flecked sinks and flowered vinyl flooring slowly disappeared and the home we had in our heads became a reality. It took years, but we eventually got to every room, some more than once, and the results made us really proud, not just because we liked the way it looked, but because we did it ourselves.

Over the past decade the house has hosted a slew of family members (including some who are no longer here), it's introduced us to a few people who we now think of as family and helped us welcome two new members to our own nuclear family—one with a tail and one without. It's been a house filled with music and laughter and tears. We've danced in its hallways, wrestled on its floors and run through its yard. It's been a part of us … it's been home.

Now it's time for someone else to create their own memories in it, I just hope they love it as much as we have—and that they keep my hedges trimmed nice and neat.

Here's a drawing my brother and sister-in-law had created when we first got married.

And here's a few shots of the inside.