Have you heard? We sold our house last week. In less than a month. For far more than we ever thought we'd get. It's all so exciting and moving so quickly. We close in 5 weeks even though our new house won't be ready for 3 more months. Awesome. This means we're going to move twice. We even signed an apartment lease last week. So it's pretty safe to say our summer will be quite the whirlwind.
About 3 months ago Mikey and I made the crazy decision to build a new house. Which has been fun and exciting planning out our new floor plan and where our furniture would go. I could envision where my Nana & Grandfather's hundred-year-old church pew resting in our new entry. We had everything mapped out. From the placement of can lights to the measurements of our new deck. Plans were made, down payments were paid and we are excited. The "big dig" started a few weeks ago and we're the proud new owners of a basement and a whole lot of dirt. Ha!
Then reality set in that we'd have to sell our current house. Let go. Move on from the place we have called home for nearly 8 years. Whoa.
Reality set in. Big time.
I'd have to leave this house. The very first house I've ever owned. Heck, the very first house I've ever really lived in (I grew up in a townhouse). I thought we'd live here forever and I was tickled to own our very own home. Grow roots.
I remember the day we moved from our 1910's duplex in Bro.adripple to this much newer (1970's) house in Carmel. Our best friends, Sam & Bridget Tynan, met us at our new house when the movers arrived...they got there a bit before we did. I walked into our new house excited to see our possessions inside, only to be greeted by our confused friends. I asked what was wrong and they just smiled. Apparently a new neighbor of ours with Down Syndrome was directing the movers as to where our belongings should go. "Put the mattress right there, in front of the fireplace. Perfect!" I will never, ever forget that day. Gaining keys to our first house together and watching a new neighbor and friend direct traffic in our home. Priceless.
We bought the house the same year we married, in 2004, just in time to host my family's annual Thanksgiving gathering. Our prerequisite? Enough space for all my family to sleep under one roof. Pretty sure Mike told me about this house one day, we visited the next day, and put an offer on it the day after that. Looks like that's how we work around here. We set our minds to something and we just plow forward, full steam ahead.
This house has seen a lot from the McCullochs over the past 8 years.
We came into our house with Baxter the Bully, only to say goodbye to him years later. I can still hear Baxter's heavy, snorting breathing, sprawled out on the tile floor after a long walk to cool off. Drool spilling everywhere. Or see him humping Ricky's leg as soon as he walked into our door. Baxter was my main man throughout my (short-lived) first marriage, my divorce and my years of infertility. That little bulldog received more hugs from me and listened to me cry more than anyone else at the time. And these walls contain those memories.
We've hosted many pre-kid dinner parties, Thanksgiving meals, Indy 500 pre-parties, family reunions and baby showers here. We used to pack every room on our first floor with tables for fancy dinner parties with name cards, place settings and games. And formal invitations to boot.
We became pregnant within months of moving in, only to tragically lose the pregnancy months later. We underwent years of fertility treatments...many nights of crying myself to sleep, taking pregnancy tests, taking my temperatures, giving myself hormone injections, many failed attempts at artificial insemination and a second attempt at in vitro fertilization (which was our final attempt and fortunately it was successful), which brought us Izzy. Flash forward 2 years and these walls saw my crinkled up face when I peed on a stick and learned I was pregnant with Laney. When doctors told me it would never happen on our own. And it did. Oh, how I wept.
Bringing home Izzy 2007
We have brought home two beautiful, healthy daughters to this home. Complete with Mike's large signs in the front yard, "It's a girl!" While the dogs sniffed the car seats filled with newborn smells and my mom readied the house for what was to come. Sleepless nights and hazy days.
We finally were able to convert one of our three guest bedrooms into a nursery (we bought this house knowing we wanted to fill it with kids). After years of dreaming of one. I nursed two little girls in that nursery, in my glider, reading a book in the middle of the night with my headlamp on (which I now use for nighttime running!). I learned how to nurse, how to change a diaper, how to rock my babies to sleep, how to have dance parties, how to snuggle and bond with my girls in that nursery. I text Jaime more times than I can count from that nursery ("What do I do when there is projectile vomit in the crib but she is still sleeping?" or "Will she ever sleep more than 2 hours in a row?!?!"). That little room has so many memories in it that make my heart burst from my chest.
Izzy's first birthday...Laney's first birthday
Nanny Elissa and Laney Bug tucked into her swing to nap
We had a nanny here that basically raised my newborn Laney while I went back to work for everyone's sanity. Elissa taught Laney how to take a bottle (after a week of a nursing/hunger strike), she was able to get her to nap in her swing in our living room while she played in the play room with her son and Izzy. Mind you the swing was on super, duper high speed and we feared she may either be flung from the swing or apt for some damage to her brain from the shear speed it required for her to fall asleep. Swaddled as if straight-jacketed. Man, the amount of batteries we went through with that swing.
We converted our formal living room into a full-on play room in anticipation of Laney staying home for her first year. I had guilt of putting a 12 week old into daycare. And even more guilt about keeping a 2 year old home full time away from the friends and fun that daycare provided. What's our resolution? Turn an unused room into a very lived-in, fun and playful room for our girls. I'm sure our friends thought we were crazy. And maybe we were. But the Littles had fun in there. For years.
Speaking of conversions, Mike has done his fair share of shaking things up around here. There was the time when I went away for 2 weeks for pharmaceutical sales training and returned to our half bathroom fully changed from the Po.ttery Barn-esque decor to a rock-n-roll themed bathroom. Complete with a velvet Elvis about the throne, band posters and every one of his concert ticket stubs lining the walls. Our friends (mostly the husbands) thought it was awesome. Their wives (and myself)? Not so much. It was fun and new and kitchy for a few months. Until that U2 (or was it Bob Marley?) poster would fall slowly on my head whilst using the facilities. It's since been converted back to a good old fashioned PB-esque bathroom. I wish I had a picture of this...but you can only imagine why I never took one!
There was also the time when I was gone for a weekend when Mike converted what was once a large, square area of landscaping (smack dab in the middle of our large backyard) into a (wait for it...) putting green. Makes sense, right? Because my husband is such a golf aficionado. That lasted a year or so until I got pregnant and transitioned that perfect square into a resting place for our hammock. Where I spent 9 months napping, tanning my pregnant belly and negotiating real estate deals. Never has a putting green seen so much action. Until it was dug up and grass seed planted to cover up any remains of such travesties as middle-of-the-yard landscaping and putting greens. Our backyard has never looked better.
Other projects Mike has done here include (but not limited to): finishing half of our basement, tiling our back splash not once but twice, replacing toilets, tiling our back entry, replacing our kitchen sink and faucet, laying wood floors in our living room, constructing a play set in our backyard and taking out french doors that lead to our backyard and replacing them with a sliding glass door. Let me just add that his father, Bob, had a hand in every one of these projects. I'm sure Bob is thrilled that we're building a new house so there won't be any fixer-upper projects in his (near) future.
Favorite room in the house
Lots of memories in this room
Bug at the back door
Iz at the back door
Laney loves to rest on the step down into the family room
Countless hours spent with this view out the back
Love
Our great room is my favorite room in the house. This is where we have spent the majority of our time in our house. Movies, late night girl talk and dance parties to name a few. Looking out our back door while sitting in this room can still stir up so many vivid memories.
The girls and their birthday shirts
When we told friends that we were selling our home and building a new one, the reaction wasn't as positive as we anticipated. I can count on both hands the number of people that said, "But we loooove your house, I can't believe you're selling it!" Dude, we love our house, too. You're not making this any easier on us. But we're simply outgrowing it. We've fixed or repaired or replaced about everything we could short of remodeling. Remodeling would consist of blowing out walls and cost us a fortune. We figured why not spend that money on something that we really wanted. Something that we could create from the ground up. That would fit our every need. And all the while move into a smaller school district and onto a less busy street (I can't tell you how many times Mike has gotten into an altercation with a car that has blown through the stop sign...embarrassing, but necessary with kids around).
I love this house so much...and I love the memories we've created here. Mike has to keep reminding me that when we move our memories won't be left here, among these four walls. But rather, the memories will come with us and always be with us. Memories don't live in a physical space. They live in our hearts.
So you can only imagine how hard it was for me to begin the process of de-cluttering the closets and cabinets and drawers. Almost 8 years of memories were crammed into these spaces. And I had to make them (the spaces, not the memories) look nearly empty so buyers could see all the space we had and envision all of their belongings in said space. I'm ok with purging. I'm even great with organizing. But what got me was when I had to start making our home look impeccable, almost unlived in as a model home looks. It was if I had to erase our presence almost. Take down personal pictures (I'll admit, I left ones up that were nailed to the wall). Convert the toy room back into a formal living room (this confused the girls and quite honestly changed the energy of our house completely). Bring back upstairs and reassemble the dining room table Mike made me for a wedding present. And make the entire house shine (mind you, Mike made the exterior of our home shine as he painted the house, painted the deck, re-landscaped, planted flowers, organized the garage et al).
My most painful part of this process was when it was time to clean windows and mirrors. Easy task, right? Until I got to my master closet's full length mirror. I knelt down in front of it, spray bottle in hand, ready to clean, when I looked at the mirror close up (I'm usually standing feet away from it checking myself out). That's when I saw them. The fingerprints. The slobber marks. The kisses. And then I remembered. I haven't cleaned that mirror since we moved in. On purpose. Those hand prints and mouth prints were made by my two little babies learning to discover themselves in my mirror, crawling towards their reflection and entertaining themselves while I would shower or get ready or fold laundry. I wasn't ready to clean those memories away. So I wept. Full body shaking and weeping. And willed myself to clean the mirror. I believe I cleaned it very angrily. Then stripped off my clothes and took the hottest shower in memory. Sobbing to myself because I just rid my entire house of any trace of my girls' fingerprints.
The next morning I woke with a fresh mind and a fresh perspective. We had made the decision to move weeks before. My heart was just trailing a little behind.
I needed that grieving to gain perspective.
In the weeks that have passed, each day I get more and more excited about our new house. And I am able to let go of this house a little more. If you know me, you know that I have a hard time with letting things go. I hang on something fierce. Letting go is not easy for me. But I know that with closing the door to 139 Hawthorne Drive another door will open. And even though we won't physically live here any more, my heart will carry with it all the memories we've made inside these four walls.
A friend of mine suggested getting a watercolor of our house as a memory. I hired an artist and she came up with this in 2 days. Can't wait to mat and frame this gem and display it somewhere special in our new home.
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