Making home MINE

It seems ages ago I ran giddy through my new house, unable to believe it was really the place I’d live for the next few years.  5 short weeks later, these 44 walls are starting to feel like home.  (44?  Just a random number…it’s a whole lot more than 4, at any rate).

Welcome...come on in. 

Friday afternoon, my new furniture got delivered.  I finally finished unpacking—100%.  My bedroom now feels less like a place to sleep and more like a room to live in.  My suitcases are off the floor and tucked away in one of my many closets.  My alarm clock has a new home on a nightstand, and my bedside lamp has finally shed its protective bubble wrap and is plugged into the wall. 

In my living room, just by moving my router from the floor to my new side table, its bright green lights remind me that I live here and it’s home. 

In the kitchen, my stainless steel fridge finally bears one of my favorite magnets, which reads, “Wherever you are, it is your friends who make your world.”  When I first got that magnet, right before moving to PR, I didn’t really believe it.  My friends made up my world back home, of course.  But moving to a brand new place, how could I be sure that the people I met would be enough to “create my world”?  Yet they did, surely enough.  And now that I’m in yet another place, even at only one month in, already it is my new friends who make up a huge part of the reason life is worth living. 

But I digress.

Over the past few weeks, I’ve started to make this condo mine.  I’ve moved into its spaces.  Not all of them, of course.  There are still 5 rooms (6, if you count the bathroom in the maid’s quarters) which are simply empty.  I shut the doors and more or less pretend the rooms don’t exist.  Or, in the case of the “pantry room” next to my dining room, I leave the doors open and use it as a shortcut—a hallway, if you will—from front hallway to laundry area (via the kitchen). 

Seriously...can't we just get rid of that wall
 and double the size of my dining room?
(Dining room on the right, pointless room on the left) 

I have places, now.  I sit at the dining room table on my computer.  I watch movies (on my computer) on the living room couch.  I work out in the mornings (will Jillian Michaels egging me on) in the upstairs “hallway” area where I am fairly certain no one can see into the windows…even with no curtains over them.  My laundry dries in the covered mudroom next to the laundry room.  My keys hang on the decorative hook I bought which adorns the wall next to the front door.  This place, slowly but surely, is become more than blank white walls and cold floors.  It is becoming mine.