changes

There's been a big change for us in terms of "home" lately. After years of talking about it, we recently rented out our house in Mill Creek (about 30-40 minutes north of Seattle) and moved into Seattle for a change of pace. We have always tossed around the idea of living in the city but have also enjoyed NOT being right in the heart of it all. Our home in Mill Creek is a great escape after time in the city. It's peaceful, calm, big, beautiful and wonderful...but it lacks a few things for us in terms of its location.

Number one is the commute for Nathan. On a bad day (which is every day) he could be sitting in traffic for at least an hour. And let's be honest, when all you want to do is get home after a work, an hour of traffic is never enjoyable.

Secondly, we have a big huge house and no one to share it with. The majority of our friends live waaay south of Mill Creek so a drive over is at least 30 minutes to an hour. Specifically, we have a group of about 7 couples that all live within 15 minutes of each other, except us. So it was pretty rare that anyone in that group would come out to our house. So...big huge house for only two people seemed kind of wasteful. Sure, we loved all the space and it always came in handy when we had overnight guests or friends over, but that was so rare. Most weekends we'd drive all the way to our friends, have to pack up Scrappy and stay the night. Not that slumber parties can't be fun but we're 27/28 and have a really comfy bed of our own...we don't want to do that every weekend.

Lastly, Mill Creek is a wonderful community. It's safe, friendly and we really enjoy it. But we just feel a little too young for it. We don't have little kids to think about right now so the benefits of Mill Creek's family community just don't do much for us. Did we intend to have kids in that house? Yes, but our life schedule hasn't exactly gone as we thought it would...So we are readjusting. We are pretty low-key and don't need a bustling area but we could definitely see the benefits of being in walk-able Seattle with restaurants, boutiques, grocery stores, theaters and things to do right at our finger tips...and frankly, we've been wanting that.

When we bought the house in Mill Creek, we always said we were on a 5 year plan. We knew it wasn't our forever home but we were ready to buy. We had chosen two cities to live in and Mill Creek far outweighed the other (funny enough, the second city is the one in which and near most of our friends and while we'd love to be near them we still really don't want to live in that area). We don't regret buying the house and we can definitely say we LOVED living there. The house itself was awesome, the layout, the space, the size, the closets, the bathrooms, the pantry, the kitchen... and if we could just pick it up and move it, we would be set.

But we can't. So, we posted it on Craigslist and were flooded with interested renters. Luckily a really great couple in their 50's caught our eye and the more we talked to them, the more we realized how perfect they would be for our house. Their grandkids live 4 minutes from our house and they LOVE our house. They have actually thanked us numerous times for giving them the opportunity to live there. That makes us feel really really good about someone else living in our home.

As for us, we knew we wanted to be in Queen Anne, Fremont, Ballard, Wallingford or Green Lake. We wanted to be within walking distance of everything, we wanted the new place to have some character and we wanted it to be fun. In came the little blue house in Queen Anne. It was built in the 1900's and has recently been turned into an upstairs and downstairs duplex. The upstairs is now our home and it's pretty adorable. Original wood floors, yellow and white striped wall paper, cute old details AND an amazing location.

We started the process of moving in in the middle of March so we've been here for almost a month. There were definitely moments (rather, hours) of ohmygosh, what did we do (mostly on my part) after realizing how difficult it was to move a 4 bedroom 2200 square foot house into a 1 bedroom 900 square foot house..with no garage. And one closet. In the whole house. Yeah, huge panic ensued for quite a few days. We had a garage sale, we purged, we donated, we went to the dump twice...And we made it in. We still have a few boxes that are waiting to be unpacked because we are lacking the creative furniture in which to store it...but we are getting there. Why I ever thought we could live in one bedroom I don't know, but we are doing it and it will forever be our adventure.

The dining room

We only signed a year lease on both our house and the rental. Our tenants want to stay in our house for 5 years so we are pretty covered there as we decide what comes next. Nathan's commute is 18 minutes now so there is a pretty slim chance we will ever go back to Mill Creek. We walk to get groceries, we walk to amazing restaurants, I go to an awesome hot yoga studio, I have discovered my new favorite boutiques, we take the Monorail downtown, we love the Ballard Market, we get to hang out with Seattle friends we love so much, we never have to drive home after a night out...It's been pretty great. While one bedroom might not work for us beyond this year, I think it's safe to say we could see ourselves staying around here for a while. What that means next, who knows, but the change has been good. We needed to shake things up, we needed to break out of what was comfortable...and that has definitely happened.

The living room, clearly Scrappy makes himself at home.