The last time I wrote it was February – six months ago!  February was a big milestone month for my husband and I.  In addition to celebrating our anniversary – the date we met – we also reached a big milestone with our home – our house became ours!  Our mortgage was paid off!

What a relief.  It felt amazing to know that we reached this huge milestone together.  We did several refinancing moves, leading to the shortening of the mortgage period.  This was one of the best decisions we made.  I had to thank my sister and brother-in-law for the discussion we had many years ago when they shared with us that they had refinanced to shorten the period of their mortgage.  Because of that discussion, my husband and I decided to do the same when we had the chance.

So what all this has to do with my hiatus from writing?  A lot!  After paying our mortgage, we decided that it was time to pay attention to our home.  Although we were not envisioning a major remodeling, we wanted to ‘refresh’ our home.  So that’s what’s being happening during the last six months.

It’s funny how one idea leads to another and soon you find yourself with multiple projects.  You start working in one area of the house and then the adjacent area calls for attention.  And so it happens that we ended up doing a lot more than what we originally anticipated.

Little by little, my whole attention went to the house and the millions of ideas of things I wanted to do.  I became drawn to everything ‘home’ and spent every minute exploring ideas and creating new ones.  It was a challenge to keep everything within a reasonable budget, so I also spent a lot of time doing research.

I call my experience going through a ‘nesting’ period.  I love our house and it felt so good to pay attention to it again.  It felt so good to think about our home and how to improve it for our future.  We enjoyed every minute we spent making our house better, prettier, and more comfortable for us – cementing our future into a place that will sustain us for many years to come.

I felt like I was building our future nest.  Dealing with all the home improvement challenges gave me an immense amount of comfort and peace.

One of my favorite projects was to update our sunroom.  We put new floors, bought some new furniture pieces, re-purposed old pieces, and added a few new accents.  The sunroom is now my oasis.  The sunroom makes me smile every time I sit in my favorite chair.  My soul is embraced with warmth, joy, and love.  I look forward to spending many hours in my favorite room in our  home – my nesting place.