However,I haven't been in Korea since October.
When Ken was assigned this project, we had just moved to another house in Texas. Our thought was that we would stay in this house forever when we bought it. It had all the criteria we thought we were looking for - it was on a golf course, it had a swimming pool and it was a location that was conducive for Ken's work until he retired.
Ken usually works on projects that are for only a few months at a time, but this project in Korea was scheduled to be around 3 years. Our daughter had just graduated from college and was returning to Houston to job hunt. After living in the house for a year, we came to conclusion that it really and truly wasn't the house for us. We absolutely loved alot of the features of the house - all the covered patios and balcony, the pool, the transom windows, the hardwood floors, the curving staircase with the wrought iron banister - to name a few. However, the floor plan really wasn't something that was great for us. I think that a one story house will be of prime importance in our list of musts next time. Anyway, we put it on the market and sold it to the first person who looked at it on the first day of it being listed. This all happened more quickly than we had anticipated, so we were at a loss of what to do at that time. We decided to rent a 2 bedroom apartment with a 2 car garage in which our daughter would live and we would be there whenever we were in town.
Well, it didn't take long before we realized that this really wasn't a great answer to our housing dilemma. First of all, we should have put a whole lot more things in storage and a whole lot less in the apartment. Whenever I visited, I felt like I was always shifting things around and making piles of stuff in our bedroom. Secondly, we felt like we were intruding on our daughter and the life she was trying to create for herself out of college. Last, but not least, we still spent alot of time while we were home at our parents' house. Both of our parents live within 30 minutes of each other in the northern part of Texas - a 5 1/2 drive from Houston.
The answer came when the elderly man that lived next to my parents passed away. It took awhile for me to come around (Ken was more set on this than me), but we ended up buying the house.
I finally realized that our daughter has a new life of her own and that when we came home, visiting our parents was more important and fun.
Anyway, to try to cut this saga short, we bought the house and I went back to get it a little more presentable. It was built in the 1970's, with the prerequisite popcorn ceiling, wood paneling, and gold and brown tubs and toilets.
So I spent most of the fall getting the house ready for us to live in whenever we were home. My father, who is a builder, helped me sooooo much. I really enjoyed some of the projects, like wallpaper, that we took on together and it was great to get to work with him in this way.
Ken and I have always wanted to build a house someday and this definitely was an eye opener into all the decisions that have to be made. I really don't care about windows or doors but those decisions have to be made. Paint color is more difficult than you think - do you know how many shades of white there are? The absolute most difficult part is getting painters, plumbers, counter top installers, etc. to actually arrive at your house and actually do the work. All those TV shows I have watched on HGTV and TLC on flipping houses came alive for me at that point.
It finally came to a close. There are definitely more things to be done, but we can comfortably live there whenever we go home. I don't have piles of stuff everywhere - I actually have empty drawers and cabinets. We elected to not take everything out of storage and move it there because we had a ready supply of furniture from my parents. My mother closed her gift and home accessory store the year before and there was a wealth of items she had kept because she couldn't bear to part with them. The only large items I had to purchase was a sofa, a couple of chairs and a mattress. I used her cast offs (if you could call them that) and then picked up a few odd items from antique stores in town. For those that don't know me well, I would like to interject a few comments. I am someone who loves to decorate her home. I pore over home magazines and my first stop in a store is the home decor area. I have a definite style to my previous homes. However, everything was in storage. It really was a freeing experience to move into a home with nothing. It makes you realize how much "stuff" you carry around in your life and how little you really need. It was so much fun. I used entirely different colors than my usual repertoire. I went with greens, blues and some brown.
I hated being away for so long but I would do it again in a heartbeat. I don't know how long we will keep the home but we feel it is a good investment nevertheless. All I know is that on Christmas Eve, we had our daughter, both sets of our parents and my sister and her husband (who, incidentally, live across the street!) over for dinner. It was such a wonderful evening. I didn't have my usual Christmas dishes, I had a small tabletop Christmas tree and we sat at 2 separate tables to eat with mismatched place mats and dishes.
But we had everything.
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