Renting vs. Owning

So what are your feelings on the rent-versus-own dilemma? With home prices steeply rising before leveling off at the end of last summer, as well as higher interest rates, many people who could own are now opting to just rent instead, indefinitely. 

Home ownership does, after all, come with a lot of surprise costs (you often don't realize something like a stove or an HVAC system is failing until it falls over dead). There's also a lot of regular maintenance, which coincidentally, did not get done on this current house and which allowed us to knock thousands off the asking price, meaning you can pay for it now, or pay for it later -- your choice.  But you will pay. 

Renting, on the other hand, provides a lot of freedom from responsibility but very little security; you can be asked to vacate your home in 30 days by your landlord, for a variety of very legal and valid reasons which have nothing whatsoever with the fact that you've been a great tenant. 

Living in and renting a company house for a year, we debated renting versus owning a lot. I was actually pretty happy renting since we had room for the chickens and raised beds and the freedom to do pretty much whatever we wanted with the place, but Big Ag hated renting. He wanted a place he could own outright. So he never really settled in there, despite having his dream barn/shop. What I didn't realize is that I hadn't really settled in, either. 

I know this because now that we're homeowners again, things feel completely different. I can't tell you why, but it just feels more like home. The things you laugh at in your rental, like outdated fixtures, you check the budget on in your owned home to see if you can afford to change them. It's like dating versus marriage. There are marriage deal-breakers that we all probably think are amusing and interesting in someone we're having coffee with, like having a pet python or finding out they painted all their bedroom walls black. But is that person marriage material? Oh hell no.

What's funny for me is the amount of old household habits that have come back now that we're in our own place again. I just made a batch of soap last week, we have two new raised beds installed, all ready to go for vegetables this summer, and I planted one of the raised beds over the leach field with sunflowers, hollyhocks, gladiolas, peonies, and zinnias. I've also been working on the front yard landscaping, just adding a few plants I miss from California and which also grow great here in Oregon, like rosemary, English lavender,  and Russian sage.

I had four raised beds in the rental that I never used, and plenty of chances to make soap if I'd wanted to. So why didn't I? Probably because of some subconscious feeling that I just didn't want to do things that would make me feel committed to settling in there. Coffee was fine. Marriage was out of the question.  

Perhaps it really does matter whose name is on the title deed. There may be a deeper level of settling into a place that only comes when you know it's yours -- when no one can ask you politely (or otherwise) to leave. 

And I'm sure "settling in" means different things to different people, but settling in is definitely what we do when we're home. 

And we are home.

Slow but steady progress

We knew when we bought this house that our road to making it something we loved was going to be a long one. I don't think there was a single thing we gazed upon our first couple of weeks here that we did not want to change -- everything from ceiling paint to walls to trim to carpet to a remodeled kitchen, to exterior colors. That's a daunting feeling, which is a fancy way of saying sometimes it made me feel hopeless. But the key to overcoming that is action, and so every day we chip away a little bit at the chore list and try and take time to enjoy the progress. I will have to start taking more "before" pictures so the real impact of the "before and after" transformations can be seen. 

Some things will have to wait until we have the financial resources to make them happen, like the kitchen expansion/remodel, and exterior painting. But a coat of interior paint costs very little in comparison to either of those things, so I've been focusing my energies on that, as well as adding a bit to the landscaping (which was already about 90 percent complete and done well when we moved in, amen and hallelujah to that) and making the front porch a bit more welcoming. Our totally-out-of-place-in-a-farmhouse vaulted entryway needed something added to it, too. It's amazing what some accessorizing can do for a room, and I don't think there's a single room in our house (including ceilings) I will not be visiting with a paintbrush and/or some tchotchkes very soon. 

Come on up and sit down, even though heaven knows I'd love to get rid of this whole blue motif and go with a nice warm gray. Patience.

Coming soon....a new farmhouse chandelier. Be gone, brass monstrosity from 1996! In the meantime, enjoy some colored fish bottles and random farm decor.

I love clean, bright trim to a point of being neurotic about it. I literally re-paint baseboards once a year, so this freshly painted window trim is thrilling me. Help.

I also decided that the oak trim on the doors, windows and closets has to go, starting with the bedrooms on the second floor.  I've only done one window so far, but the difference is astonishing. 

One other funny side note is that there were some areas of the house which just weren't working. Namely, the entryway which runs directly into the stairs. Upon doing some research, I learned that this is actually terrible in terms of the feng shui of the house, or energy flow. I moved a painting, added some inviting candles, plus a nice round wine barrel and lamp to help the "energy" flow into the rest of the downstairs rooms, drawing focus away from the front stairs. I think it worked. I'm not big into the fortune-telling aspects of feng shui, but I do believe in having good flow from room to room, and some feng shui remedies address just that. So sign me up. I'm a believer.

Round shapes are supposed to invite energy flow in small, boxy spaces like this one, according to what I call Feng Shui and what Big Ag refers to as "Furniture Astrology." 

In unrelated news, we also visited the local iris gardens and I bought about 10 bulbs to put into the ground this fall, in an assortment of gorgeous colors.