Double your pleasure…

Yeah, you dirty pervs thought that title would mean sex, didn’t you? 🙂 No, unfortunately it’s my entry into the world of dual-homeownership.

Don’t know if that’s a real phrase, but I’m using it as such.

I practically grew up in my grandparents’ home. Being only five minutes from my parents’ house, I was there every weekend and all during summers and holidays. It’s strange to now own the house. It’s an old house, over sixty years old, and while it’s not in “bad” shape, it needs a lot of maintenance that my grandfather didn’t do in the past couple of years. It needs a lot of upgrades (new wiring, anyone?) and yes, there are things I’d like to do to it, like add on a second bathroom.

But…it feels like home. And there’s no way I’ll get rid of it. Fortunately there’s no mortgage, so it’s not a huge drain on our monthly expenses. But shuffling around my budget is a big stress. There are upgrades to our home that I’d wanted to do (new kitchen, bathrooms, etc.) that are now pushed to the back burner.

But…it feels like home.

One thing I did last week (still paying for physically this week) is planted a bunch of bushes in the front yard that will hopefully grow tall enough to screen the house from the road. There used to be a huge old oak tree in the front yard, but it died a couple of years ago and had to be removed. We also put a couple of smaller trees in the front yard to hopefully fill in with some shade as they grow.

It’s a smaller house than ours, and I’d forgot how juggling around only one bathroom could be so NOT fun sometimes LOL, but…it feels like home. Know what I mean?

So now we’re going back and forth between the houses, trying to get the other house into maintainable shape so we can relax when we’re there. Our animals are learning to enjoy road trips back and forth. And I’m finally starting to find a level of healing in my grief that both of my grandparents are now gone.