Burnerblog

It looks like changes are coming our way.

Good changes, but changes that will assuredly bring both excitement and some turmoil to our already busy lives. While nothing is in concrete yet, the ball is rolling and unless something comes along unexpectedly, we’re going to more than likely move ahead with the plans.

Hurricane Ike's First Appearance

The turmoil would come from the fact that we’d have to uproot our entire home to move into another one, leaving behind the home that Sherry and I have made over the past five years. We’ve worked hard for what we have, and have put a lot of work into this house to turn it into our home. The excitement comes from the fact that we’d be moving into a bigger house with Sherry’s mom joining our family unit.

Yeah, we’re most likely going to be moving into a new home.

Before my dad died, the plans were for us to move into his house and for him to build a sort of studio-efficiency apartment on the back of the garage and to put in a pool. He would then live close to us (in the backyard) but still have some degree of separation. This was mostly for financial reasons; it was far less expensive to add a pool and a small addition than to buy a new home. Well, in the situation with Sherry’s mom, she doesn’t want to be in a separate “small house” (understandably; I’m not sure I would want to, either!), and our current home just doesn’t have the room for another adult to live with us. The only solution then is to move into a bigger home.

Fortunately, there are still quite a few communities building locally that would allow the kids to stay in their current school until they graduate HS, and these communities have homes large enough to accommodate our extended family comfortably. With both Sherry’s mom and I working from home, we both need work areas, and the homes we’re looking at have enough room for us to both have an office and not take away from the total space the family needs and uses on a daily basis. Also of concern would be a third garage and larger driveway; currently, our driveway can accommodate a total of four cars (and that’s VERY tight). By next July, our home with have SIX drivers. Considering each of us will have a car, that’s just too many cars to shuffle every time someone needs to go somewhere.

So, there you have it. While things can still change, currently, this is the plan. Sherry and I will be looking at a few model homes today at lunch, and she and her mom will be looking at some tomorrow afternoon (I’ll join them for a while until I have to go to a meeting). We’ll know more tomorrow afternoon, but it looks as if this is all coming together.

Sherry is having the hardest time of all of us because she really loves the house and all the gardening work she’s done, but in the end, we both know that we can use all the experience we’ve gained making this place “ours” and carry it forward and use that experience to make the new house our new home. Of course, the fact that the new house is going to have a pool in the backyard does make this change a little easier to swallow.