The Least Responsible Thing I've Ever Done

I always thought we’d live in this house forever.

Mike and I bought it seven years ago when we moved back to Canada from Chicago and I genuinely love this house. It was our first home here. We’ve raised our girls here. Every room has a memory. Every floorboard knows exactly where the dog likes to throw up.

Our plan was always to renovate. And lord knows I love a project, particularly one where I’m biting off more than I can chew.

Not because I enjoy living in construction. Although I do have an alarming number of opinions about grout. It just felt like what sensible adults do. You buy the house. You slowly make it yours. You spend two years texting your contractor things like “Just checking in!” before eventually ending up with a kitchen island large enough to host a full blown karaoke concert and it’s the stage.

But the more we planned the renovation, the more I realized we were trying to convince ourselves this house could be something it wasn’t.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with it. It just wasn’t the house our family needed for the next twenty years. Trying to squeeze teenagers, university kids coming home, friends sleeping over and eventually grandchildren (if we are so lucky) into it felt a bit like trying to button my jeans from 2009. Possible? Maybe. Comfortable? Not a chance.

I kept trying to solve the problem with floor plans instead. What if we moved this wall? What if we added over there? What if we spent a completely irresponsible amount of money and still didn’t get what we actually wanted? And we’d never get our money out of it because the lot is tiny and the house wasn’t made for that.

Then… the same we week we were about to submit our permits for the reno, a friend of mine listed her house. She’s also happens to be an incredibly talented interior designer, which meant walking through it felt less like a house showing and more like one of the “Oh hey AD - come on it” home tour videos. She let me walk through alone with the girls. No realtor. No pressure. Just as friends.

I walked into the kitchen and my brain did something it almost never does.

It shut up. A shock.

Normally every house comes with a running commentary… and we’ve seen a lot over the last few years.

“We’d have to change that.”

“That wall could come out.”

“The kitchen is great if you ignore... literally all of it.”

This one didn’t.

It just... fit. It felt like our next chapter had somehow already been built. For the first time, I wasn’t trying to force the future into the wrong house. The future was already standing in front of me making coffee.

The weirdest part? There wasn’t really a negotiation. Not with the house. Not with ourselves. Then then universe decided subtlety was overrated: the door code was the same code we’ve had on our front door for years. The same code that’s somehow ended up on all of our iPads, random passwords, my bank PIN since I was about twelve, and even my best friend’s front door.

At some point you have to stop calling that a coincidence and at least acknowledge the universe has a decent sense of humour.

The problem with instinct is that it never shows up when you’ve got a free weekend. It arrives during complete and total chaos.

The same week we bought the house was the last two weeks of school. Which every parent knows is somehow busier than the two weeks before Christmas. Every concert, picnic, teacher gift, spirit day and permission slip gets jammed into ten business days. Then, because apparently no one consulted mothers, Father’s Day lands smack in the middle of it all. Oh. And we suddenly had to list our house.

This wasn’t part of some beautifully executed five-year plan. On Monday we were renovating. By Friday we were packing up seven years of our lives, getting the house ready for photos, hosting our annual end-of-school backyard dance party for roughly a hundred kids and parents, preparing for my in-laws to arrive from California and trying to leave for the cottage without having a complete psychological collapse.

It was... a lot.

Which is probably the lesson. We wait for the perfect time to make big decisions. The quiet season. The month when life calms down.

It doesn’t.

Sometimes the right thing arrives anyway and all you can do is trust your gut, sign the papers and start packing. The last few weeks I’ve been quiet on Instagram. Quiet here. Quiet in pretty much every spare moment I’ve managed to find.

And if you happened to run into me in the grocery store and I looked vaguely annoyed or deeply disappointed in the avocados, I’m sorry.

It wasn’t you. I was just trying to mentally pack an entire house while deciding whether we needed more dishwasher fluid.

Thanks for being here.

Nat xx