I know a lot of men who, when their wives are expecting, complete a big home improvement project.  I suppose this is the man’s way of “nesting,” of completing something before the baby comes because he know that nothing will get done for the next twelve months or more.  My  brother-in-law and sister, who are expecting their fourth child, are prime examples of this:  they are finishing their basement into a gigantic family/rec/play/sanity room. They started the project long ago, but they are in a hurry to get it done now that the clock is ticking down.  I know others paint or refinish floors or add entire rooms onto their houses during pregnancy.  There is something about that nine month deadline that makes it feel like the race is on.  The little voice in your brain says: “Get something done while you are still getting sleep!”

In adoption I feel that same urge, but the deadline is somewhat nebulous.  I might have 2 years; I might have 4 months.  I can build a barn or paint a closet.  It all depends on how much time I have.  Even though I have that same itch, we are not adding rooms or finishing basements.  We don’t even have a basement.  Our home is fine the way it is, except for needing one bedroom painted.  

The real itch for us comes in an entirely different way.   Instead of changing one room, we think about changing all 7 of them.  And for that matter, the walls and the ceilings and the backyard and the location. We are thinking about a new house.  Call us crazy but it is the same thing that drives men to tackle extreme home makeovers before Junior is born.  We don’t have any walls to knock down, so we look at houses instead.  It is much less dirty than knocking out walls anyway.

All those thoughts and desires have manifested themselves in a great splurge of house-ogling. (My husband calls it house-stalking.)  I have been looking at houses online for the past several years.  I can tell you the ones I liked over the years and a general idea of how much they’ve sold for.  I know of several that dropped about $75,000 in price because they were on the market so long. I know these things, because looking at houses is sort of an odd hobby of mine. And it becomes an even more intentional hobby as we wait for the baby and ask ourselves: how much longer until the baby comes? Do we want to move with one child or two?  Could we sell our house since the economy has crashed and burned?  Are we nuts?

We have talked about moving from our neighborhood to another neighborhood in the area for the last several years.  Although our house meets all our needs and is in great shape, both of us have had the same desire to get an old house in good condition and live in an established neighborhood closer to the city.  What drives those desires is an appreciation for beauty and history and how wonderfully built those old houses are.  It is also the desire to live in a neighborhood, not a development–a place where houses aren’t all tan vinyl-sided clones. (No offense if you live in a tan vinyl sided house.)

We attended two open houses in some old neighborhoods just to get an idea of what we like and to keep our eyes open to the reality of old house problems (like small kitchens, small closets and no giant jet tubs).  Most of the people at the open houses were people from the same neighborhood, there to look at the house or paint colors or whatever.  When we said we were from a neighborhood “Southwest” of the city, the response from the others was “this is a neighborhood.”  I wasn’t sure whether to be offended or say amen.  I really like my neighborhood, but the thing that bothers me most is how people keep to themselves.  Do the suburbs draw people who want to get away or are people just not neighborly anymore? I’m sure there are people in these old neighborhoods that keep to themselves too, but every time I go house hunting, people actually invite me to live there.  The one couple at the open house told us where they lived and said, “If you have any questions about old houses, just knock on our door.”   And then they told us where they lived. These people were being neighborly and they weren’t even my neighbors. They were strangers.  

So all this has led me to ask myself how serious we are.  To tell you the truth, I don’t know when we’ll move to another house.   I don’t want to do anything without the Lord’s guidance, so I will just leave it to him.   What I do know is I feel the itch the way all those men do that start tearing walls out of their houses before the baby comes.  I don’t have any floors or walls to rip up in my house, so I will just look at houses instead.  

If I really get desperate, I’ll pull out the paint brushes.  That’s as dirty as it gets around here.