A house, and a home.

Have you ever realized how much more personal a home is versus a house? You 'house hunt', but it becomes your 'home sweet home'.  How is it that some freestanding structure becomes such a part of who we are as a person?

It's one of the oddest things, to tell someone you're contemplating selling your house. It's as if you're telling someone you're considering voluntarily becoming a paraplegic. There is so much shock and confusion.

Don't get me wrong, I love my home more than anything. I absolutely adore these four walls, the stair cases, the backyard, the little white fence. I love the paint colors I chose, the paint colors I painted over, the floors I stained, the things I furnished it will, the plants I planted. This house was my own. I hunted and hunted and fell in love and signed the papers five and a half years ago.

But to me, she's still just four walls. She made up the grounds for a lot of great memories, but she isn't the memories themselves. Everything filling this foundation are just additives to my life, they aren't my life itself.

Maybe it's because I am voluntarily selling my house. Maybe that is why it's so foreign.

All of this babbling is the long way of saying that Tate & I have started house-hunting. Yea, gasp, big step. It started as a hair-brained idea, as we were chatting longingly about exposed brick walls over a couple Moscow mules during one of our regular date nights. Our list of wishes and wants gracefully unfolded into a few peeks at local listings, a pre approval letter, and a call to our realtor.

I had forgotten how much I loved the house-hunting process. Stepping through front door after front door, never knowing what quirks you will find. Every house tells such a story itself, but it also provides such blank page and I can't help but start to fill those pages in my head with how our life together would unfold in each room.

Some have been total bunks from the get go, and some have sparked our interest. We already had our first minor heartbreak when we learned that a dream-inducing condo FULL of exposed-brick had received 3 offers just days after we looked at it.

All of this means that eventually it will be time to put my home on the market, to make that jump, and become an official downtown Indianapolis urbanite instead of just a suburban pretending to be hip. It's exciting, and also slightly terrifying. But mostly, it just feels right.

Here's to hoping this transition from home to house to home is everything we could have hoped for!