Today’s Bloganuary prompt is:

What irritates you about the home you live in?

I love everything about my home. There is absolutely nothing that irritates me about it. Two years ago, I was lucky enough to find my dream home. (My realistic dream home. I mean, it’s not a castle on a private island, after all). 

Here’s how the story goes. We were house-hunting. For the first time ever, we were making enough money to look for a home that wasn’t ancient, with a large load of baggage attached to it. We didn’t have to settle for a house that had old plumbing, or a bad roof, or a sinking foundation. We could look for a good, solid, new or nearly-new home, and that was both exciting and a little intimidating. It was a really new experience for us.

And even though we could look at nice homes, we do live in Louisiana, where much of the area is located in flood zones. Finding a home that had never been flooded before or was in an area that had never flooded seemed unlikely, unless we could pay a lot more than we had the ability to do.

So we looked. And we looked. I scoured the various online sites like realtor.com and zillow and all the rest nearly 24/7. We toured this home and that home. We drove through neighborhood after neighborhood.

Quick side note: We drove through a particular neighborhood somewhere here in Denham Springs. It was lovely. Nice homes. A lake or pond or two. Obviously mostly new construction. Not a lot of residents yet. But the residents we saw were beautifully diverse. I was excited. That lovely mix of diversity hasn’t been all that prominent in my experience here. The houses looked a little more expensive than our budget would allow, so we drove out of that neighborhood and kept looking. For the past two years, I’ve tried to figure out where that neighborhood is. It’s disappeared. I cannot find it. It drives me nuts some days.

Back to the original story. So one afternoon, probably around 5 p.m., I saw a new listing pop up on one of the home sites on the web. It had just been listed. And when I saw it, I knew. It was my dream home. It ticked all the boxes and just wrapped itself around my heart and sang to me. 

I immediately called my realtor, who didn’t answer. So I left a message which said, “Put an offer down on this house right now! Sight unseen! I don’t need to look at this one, I know it’s the one for us.”

She didn’t get the message until later that night, and we didn’t actually put an offer down sight unseen. Instead, she made an appointment with the seller’s realtor to show it to us the next day. Seeing it in person only reinforced my desire for it. 

The spacious living room. The teal kitchen cabinets. The enormous master bedroom. The incredibly gorgeous master bath. The pond in back for Gail to fish in. The ducks and geese that make their homes here in the pond. Everything was perfect. We made an offer. We bought the house. And here we are.

I still love it two years later.

If money were no object, of course we could find some things to make it even better. We’d put in a pool for Gail and a hot tub for me. We’d expand the back patio to make it bigger.

But there is absolutely nothing that irritates me about this house. It is glorious. And I am grateful every day that we are able to live in such a lovely home. Even if it all disappears tomorrow (like that neighborhood I lost), it will have been a slice of life that we will always cherish.

Oh, and by the way, I got just as excited when we drove through the neighborhood we live in for the first time because – guess what? It was even MORE diverse than the other. This neighborhood has an incredibly mixed bag of wonderful people of all stripes and colors and backgrounds and belief systems. I love living here. It’s a dream come true.

Here’s a glimpse of the home that we love so much.

This post is part of the WordPress Bloganuary Challenge for 2023, where everyone participating is provided a writing prompt each day. Today’s prompt was to write about what irritates me about the home I live in.