House thoughts...

Joe has this annoying habit of scouring the local listings of houses for sale. We are not in the market for a new house, but he likes to look.

In the past few weeks, he has uncovered a couple of houses that I could envision living in...to the point of daydreaming about how nice it would be to have wood-paneled walls or built-in bookcases (I am a sucker for built-in bookcases). But then I think of all the ramifications. Aside from selling OUR house, we'd be taking on more debt, needing to rethink schools and my babysitting income because we'd no longer be convenient to the families I work for now. And then there would be the additional gas for Joe's commute, because the other houses are significantly further away from his job. Etc.

Yesterday, he came upon a listing for a house I've always admired when driving by it. From the road, it is HUGE. Apparently, inside it is even larger. It has wood or laminate floors and MASSIVE living spaces and all these bedrooms and an entire extra living space (in-law suite? I don't know) above the detached garage (in addition to the attached garage space). It's just big. And, as it is apparently on a short-sale, EXTREMELY underpriced. Like, five times the space of our house, plus a couple of acres, for roughly $15K more than our house is worth. Yeah.

And the first thought I had was...how on earth would I ever find time to clean all of that? I can't find time to clean all of THIS!

Now that we have this new sunroom, our house seems...well, just right. I know the storage still sucks and we have things constantly collecting on the counter and the garage is always cluttered. But the reality is that, unless there is some great revelation from God in our future to guide us in a different direction, this next adoption will likely be our last, and our house can accommodate us and two kids quite nicely. Comfortably, even. When I think about my parents raising five kids in roughly the same space, I think...it is totally do-able with two. TOTALLY.

It's not that I don't WANT more space. I'd absolutely love a basement. I don't want to give up my sunroom, and I do like our backyard. I just don't necessarily feel like we are hurting for space.

Yes, if we had a bigger house it would be easier to consider things like foster care and, you know, having guests once in awhile. I just don't feel like it is anything urgent. I'm comfortable in our little space. Maybe it's partly because we are definitely heading into Spring and I'm not feeling so confined by our tight quarters. It's probably largely due to the fact that I just found out that we should have our mortgage paid off in 10 years. TEN YEARS. And then it will be OURS. That's kind of a big motivator, you know.

I should probably go dust something. I'm way behind, you know.