This Old House

On Friday at midnight, my husband and I pulled up to our midcentury fixer upper with a trailer full of furniture and unloaded what we considered our "essentials" into our home.  We had been praying for a home in the Asheville area since the fall when we officially decided to lean into where the Lord had planted us and to put roots down here.  We'd been praying more specifically over this particular home since January of this year.  We kept offering on the home and the owner kept saying "no," which we viewed as a "not yet."  Eventually, we found common ground and were able to close on this beautiful old home.

In late 2020, we packed Scott's things into a U-haul trailer and sent him off for what we thought was a short assignment in Asheville until he could purchase a practice he had been pursuing closer to our families in North Carolina.  Months after asking our apartment to extend our 3 month lease, and after some disappointments along the way with the practice purchase falling through, we finally started to understand that we might be in Asheville for good.  This dream place that we thought we'd essentially work and vacation in for a few months became more of a place we felt like settling down in long-term.

Scott and I have lived in a 1930s bungalow in the trendy SoBro area of Indianapolis (not so trendy when we first moved there--it was rather dodgy and "in transition" at the time when we first moved there), a sprawling 4,000 square foot 1990s home in a beautiful lake neighborhood of Columbus, Indiana, and now we're settling into a 1960s midcentury home with more wood on the walls than paint and more windows than I could ever dream of (and pray we never have to replace).  

This old house has stories embedded in its walls and memories dripping from the worn ceilings.  When I started praying for our home on Pepper Avenue, I hoped that other buyers wouldn't see the charm that we could see beyond the peeling paint and rotting wood. I hoped that someone else would say "it's too dark in here" or "this kitchen won't work," because my husband and I have long been able to look past those sorts of things and see a vision beyond all of that. For goodness sake, our last house had purple sparkly walls and sharpie marker all over the walls of the upstairs bedrooms, with the deathly hallows symbol inscribed on every door frame; I remember our realtor raising her eyebrows at us when we said we loved it and wanted to put an offer on it.  We were lucky this time around, and our realtor shared our vision of this old home. He saw that it had good bones and he used his builder and contractor's eye to help us figure out which walls could be pushed out and how we could bring new life to the dingy walls and cobwebbed windows.  

So this old house is our's now, and as I sit in the front room writing this morning, Doc is sitting in front of the large window that is almost the entire length of the wall, watching baby bunnies cross the street.  Birds are chirping and the morning fog is lifting off of the lake. I hear noises that are yet unfamiliar to me, noises that the previous owner of this home probably knew well.  I walked around the house this morning trying to figure out which switches did what, why certain lights don't come on, how you get more light into the kitchen in the early mornings with dim overhead lights.  As with our last home when we first purchased it, this one sits mostly empty.  We sold most of our belongings before moving back to North Carolina last year and now have 700 square feet of an apartment sparsely spread throughout this 3,000 square foot home.  There are Jack and Jill bathrooms attaching rooms I hope will someday have little people in them splashing around for bath time in the blue steel tub, being tucked in at night after reading bedtime stories about a boy who won't grow up and fights an evil pirate and crocodile or a girl who lives under the sea dreaming of being able to walk on land. 

This old house holds all of the memories and whispers of the past in tandem with all of our dreams for what is not yet to be. I hope we can listen and learn from what this old house has to teach us and that we can, in time, honor both the old and the new that dwell here. 

Love,

C