It’s just a house, right?

For the last few weeks, I’ve been repeating this phrase: “It’s just a house.” I mean four walls, a roof, a backyard … these things are just, well, “things” and don’t comprise the essence of my life. And, yet, they are a part of my life and have been for the last seven years. It’s hard to give them up.

This spring, Clint and I started talking about making some lifestyle changes. He wanted to change careers and jump on an opportunity to be a full-time CrossFit coach (his real passion) while doing some IT consulting on the side. To more easily implement all these changes we decided to put our house up for sale and look for something that ate up less of our income.

We bought this house seven years ago and redid almost the entire inside. The house was in hideous condition – awful paint, terrible carpet, cheap fixtures. It was a DIY project like none other. We did the work ourselves and put a lot of blood, sweat and tears into this place. It’s not easy to let it go.

It’s the only house our daughter has known. The walls have witnessed first words, first steps and a first Christmas. And yet like all homes, the memories are mixed. These same walls also shielded us during my job layoff, months of postpartum depression and the difficult year Clint was gone working in Africa.

When the house went under contract in just two days, I wept. “It’s just a house,” I told myself. And over the last couple weeks, I turned my focus to packing and how we’ll set up the new house. I was doing quite well until this week when I sold my dining room set. It wasn’t an antique or a family heirloom. It was a table and china cabinet we purchased about 12 years ago for our first house. I’d filled the cabinet with dishes and china sets passed down from family members.

I loved that table and cabinet – not the pieces themselves, necessarily, but what they represented. I didn’t grow up with a lot of fancy and fluff so, for me, that dining room set marked an arrival that I had worked my tail off to achieve.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not regretting these decisions. I’m delighted to move into our new house and excited for Clint to start his new job. But I do need to let myself reflect on – and even mourn – this passage from one phase into another. We don’t always give ourselves time to do that when we make a life change. So if you see me carrying boxes with tears in my eyes, know they are blend of happy and sad and I’m probably reminding myself, “It’s just a house.”