Looking in Unexpected Places to Fulfill Your Dreams

A couple of weeks ago I shared how our family was dealing with an unexpected circumstance. We had decided to take our home off the market after almost two years when we had two interested parties look at our home.

After several phone calls and emails with our real estate agent, we found out that one was not interested in buying after they saw our home. The other party was interested but they have had their own unexpected circumstance arise and are not ready to make firm plans about buying a home.

So, that leaves us with our original decision to take our house off the market and stay in it at least until our daughter graduates from high school in 4 years.

I’ve written about this process a few times over the last two years. Our dream was to build a home that would be custom made to fit our family’s needs and wants. Our current home has served us well for the last 5 1/2 years, however we just wanted to build our dream home.

The funny thing is after we decided to stay in our current home, our kids informed us that they really didn’t want to move!

One of the dreams I had when building a home was to give our kids larger rooms where they could study and hang out. Their current rooms are not really big enough to do more than sleep and store their stuff. In fact, my son spends more time in our game room/study area than he does in his room.

It was a bittersweet moment deciding that we felt God leading us to stay in this home. It meant putting a dream on hold, possibly forever. We don’t know how long God will direct us to to stay in this home or how many years we’ll have to enjoy it.

Here’s the crazy thing, though…we have come up with a way to love this house and make it our dream home. I’ll give more details in a minute, however I find it funny that we have spent all this time planning and looking for a new home with better laid out spaces when what we were looking for was right in front of us all along!

Wow! All that time and effort looking for our dream home when we could have been living in our dream home all along.

I’ve thought about how often I do this in life. I look high and low for a certain thing or answer only to discover what I’ve been looking for has been right in front of me all along.

Back to our plan…we decided that we could rearrange our upstairs rooms and make them work better for us.

So, basically, every room except for our game room will be switched out and used in a different way.

We have had a dedicated guest room and have only used it for guests 3 or 4 times since we’ve lived here. Because we don’t anticipate having overnight guests more than once a year, if that, we are going to turn the guest room into a study for my husband. He has always wanted a study and this house did not have a space for it. Now he is going to get his study.

My son will move to the office space outside our game room. This is probably the most unusual change we are going to make. This office space is not a normal shaped room, but it does have a window and closet, so it can be considered a bedroom. Yes, it may be weird if we have friends over and want to go into the game room to play pool or watch tv. But I think it will work well for us.

My daughter will move to my son’s old room. This room has a bathroom attached to it that is much larger than the one she is currently using. I’ve thought that she really needed access to this bathroom more than my son did. She has way more bathroom stuff than he does.

I will move my office/craft room to my daughter’s old room. I can’t wait because while it is not necessarily a bigger room, it does get more light with those gorgeous bay windows.

Finally, my old office/craft room will turn into a sitting room for my daughter. We will put a sofa bed in here for the occasional overnight guest.

The kids will now have great bedroom and hang out spaces. I don’t think we could have found or built a home with spaces like this.

Now for the fun part…painting and moving furniture around. I hope we will be able to get the upstairs complete by the middle of summer. I definitely want it finished by the time school starts in August.

Then in the fall we will most likely tackle the downstairs by painting and updating some of our furniture.

I’m looking forward to sharing our progress over the next few months.