Change is coming

We're moving to our new house this Saturday.  Yes, right after Thanksgiving!  We're going to have family in town who can help out and also spend time with the kids, so we decided that this was a good weekend to do it.  We did decide to hire movers to do the loading and unloading and are very much looking forward to not having to maneuver all our furniture out of our tiny 1906-era doors. 

All the logistical stuff aside, it feels very surreal to be leaving our current home.  Aside from the two months we spent in an apartment when we first moved here in 2004, we have lived in this house for the entire time we've been in Portland.  We looked at many, many houses before we decided on this one, and we knew it was our house within minutes, or even seconds, of walking in.  We just knew that this was the one, and boy were we right.  Not only has the house seen us grow in many ways, but the neighborhood around us has grown and changed, too.  When we moved in, for better or worse, the neighborhood had just begun to gentrify and it was still pretty rough around the edges.  If anything gave us pause when we first made the offer on this house, it was the crime statistics for the neighborhood. 

Today, again, for better or worse, the neighborhood is like a different place.  There are upscale shopping and restaurant-ing streets within a five to ten minute walk in opposite directions from our house.  Most of the overt gang activity and crime has moved on (although not all of it), and many of the houses around us have been remodeled or at least repainted!  I feel perfectly comfortable walking at night now, which is a nice thing to be able to say.

All this is to say that we have so loved living here.  We have had some of the most eventful years of our lives here, having moved in as a newly married couple and moving out as a family of five!  This house has been good to us, even with its 100-year-old maintenance issues.  We have been cozy and comfortable here for a long time.  Of course, there have been rough patches and things we didn't like about both the house and the neighborhood, but those have paled in comparison with the things we did like.  I know we will love our new house and neighborhood, too, but I think we will always look back on this house with a healthy dose of nostalgia.  A lot of good things have happened here.

When we first moved in and were checking things out, I went down to the then-unfinished basement and, for some reason, happened to look up at one of the beams.  There, in permanent marker, the house's previous owners had written "Thank you, house.  Love, J and J"  I thought it was sweet at the time and I still do, now.  This is my version of that.  Thank you, house, for everything.  We're going to miss you!

Here are some photos I took yesterday of the house as it looks right now, in transition between being lived in and being moved out of.  I also got some great shots of the kids doing a very typical thing for them - huddling around the heating vent, completely naked.  They love to be naked and they also love the heating vent.  I think they are going to love having a real fireplace in the new house!  Anyway, these photos may not be the most interesting, but I'm putting them here for posterity.