I’ve sat down to write about our process for deciding what to do with our house at least four times. I end up paralyzed by the fact that we haven’t made a decision, and I find myself rightly or wrongly wondering, “what’s the point in sharing when you don’t even have the end result yet?” But the processing of what we want to do is hard. It feels like we’ve analyzed and re-analyzed, and then analyzed some more exploring every possibility, and nothing feels quite right. For two people making a big life decision, we both don’t like it when something doesn’t feel right. That gut feeling of “yes! This is it!” guides so much of our decision making. We’re still just waiting for direction of something feeling truly right.

And yet, we know we need to do something related to our house. So here’s some of the backstory…

We love WHERE we live. We walk to the ice cream shop and the grocery store. It’s in an amazing neighborhood, and we FINALLY have neighbors with young children too. And we love that for our boys! And us! We had always dreamed of living in this area of Kansas City when we were first starting out, and when we saw this house, we both just knew this was it. (I mean, I had a small panic attack after seeing it knowing that there was a huge decision to make of whether we were going to go for it or not. But, truly in my heart and gut, I knew this was our house.)

Then, we put our blood, sweat, and tears into the backyard specifically. The gardens are awesome, and I love the space we have outside. I have so many ideas of the things I want to do outside to continue to make it even more special place.

Our issue comes that every fall rolls around, and with two boys who are growing very quickly, the house starts to feel small as we spend more and more time inside. Come winter, I dread having to spend another day up in the playroom because that’s the only truly safe place that they can play in our house.

But come each spring, the peonies start emerging, and we spend our time outside again, and I love our house and the community we’ve chosen to live in right now.

So we debate and debate. There isn’t an easy way to make our house “bigger” expanding the safe space room that our kids would have to play. We’ve explored and re-explored ways to renovate to make it more usable, and the fact is, even with a renovation, we still wouldn’t have the inside of a house that we love.

So here we are, having to make a really hard decision to leave a house in a location that we absolutely love for something that we will likely never get back to in life.

I don’t think it’s unusual to be extremely attached to a first house. It’s a very big first. A lot of “firsts” for our family happened in this house, and we’ve put a lot of love and time into it. We will look back on this time and the decision we make, and I hope feel completely at peace with whatever ends up being the course we take for our family. Right now, though, there’s a bit of grieving. And just a feeling of unease as we try to figure out what is best for our family in this stage of life.

Have you ever had to make a similar decision? How did you end up making a choice?