It has been 12 days. 12 days since my partner and I met our realtor in the back yard of the house we had collectively been placing visions of our future-selves in while we waded through the process of making it ours.

We waited on the back porch as the realtor opened the door and we walked in, the first time seeing it completely clean of any other life that had existed within its walls before us. Empty and yet so full of plans and aspirations, as if we had boxed up every hope we had for what our lives could be like within this space, just as we had boxed up all of our possessions, and they were just waiting for us to get here and dive in. Even in its simplest form, a structure without the weight of personal belongings, furniture, or tokens of someone else’s version of home inside it, it still glowed with that same energy of being home that I felt the first time we had walked through the door. Afterwards, I couldn’t stop talking about how perfect it was for us. How perfect it is.

At first, my partner was worried that I had only fallen in love with this house and felt that warm, welcoming energy because the previous owner was living here when we initially saw it. As we came closer to the reality of it becoming our home, I started to worry too, about that and about everything else. I woke up in the middle of the night for weeks before we officially closed on the house, worried that something was going to be drastically wrong. I was convinced that something had been overlooked and that we would move in to find that all of the pipes were leaking or the roof was about to cave in. He also started having nightmares; one in particular centered around mutant, giant-sized rodents. We were quite the new-home-anxiety-ridden pair.

We were assured that nothing had been overlooked. The person who assessed the house commented that we got it for a steal. That afternoon 12 days ago we carefully walked through every room, anxious, excited, terrified, and elated. Our realtor gave us the keys and left us standing in the back yard where we met him–where this whole process began. We walked back inside and through every room for more than an hour before we started moving our boxed-up belongings from our old apartment to our new home. Three days later, exhausted and full of aches, we started to unpack.

Everything is steadily coming together now. In just a few days, the dining room, which had been our dumping ground during the process of moving, went from looking like this:

To this:

The room is still pretty messy, but it has come a long way from barely being able to walk in there without tripping over things. That last picture was taken a few days ago, so more things have also been cleared out since.

The first room to be mostly put together was the living room. After three days of heavy lifting and the terrible body aches that made us both realize just how out of shape we were, we desperately needed a place to relax. Last Christmas, my father built me an entertainment center that matches the DVD cabinet he built last Christmas the coffee table and side table from the year before. We left it at his house until we moved in here so we didn’t have to move it into our apartment and then back out. Just a few days ago we went and picked it up and brought it home and it is awesome.

That’s our cat Devin in the picture on the left, and Vincent on the right.

I wake up in the morning and walk around this place with wide-eyed astonishment, unable to fully wrap my mind around the fact that this house is mine. That feeling shows absolutely no sign of going away anytime soon, and I am thankful for that.