Corey’s Green Home Project: More to Love Than (just) the Breezeway

Before purchasing our new home, Ryan and I had lived in 10 different homes (two owned and eight leased). Our former abodes spanned six different cities, up the coast of California to the Puget Sound. Some would say we have commitment issues. We say we’ve just been waiting for the one.

I know you may think I’m in love with our new home because of the breezeway and wrap-around porch; but this is only partially true. I love our new home because of the magic that surrounds it.

It’s hard to explain, but I’ll give you a few examples.

Example #1: The animals know

On the day that we were to move into one of our other homes, I arrived early to make sure the keys worked and that there was toilet paper in at least one bathroom. As I walked up the little path to the front door, new keys in hand, excited to make our new house a home, just steps before the front door something stopped me dead in my tracks. There before me lay a pigeon. Also quite dead in his tracks.

The movers (aka any family and friends that couldn’t prove beyond a reasonable doubt that they were having major surgery that day) arrived and I temporarily forgot about the pigeon (since laid to rest in the undeveloped dirt lot next door) but once we began to get settled, I quickly realized that the pigeon was trying to tell us something.

Too bad we didn’t listen.

I won’t go into what tribulation the pigeon gave his life trying to help us avert, but it may or may not have something to do with: A) a 150-foot tree falling onto our home, B) mold growing on the walls of our bedrooms, C) a neighbor with a passion for the most heavily scented fabric softener on Earth (and whose laundry vent was positioned to blow with the most amazing precision into our living room windows), or D) a raw sewage leak which someone told the builder she/he was concerned might happen, but which the builder pooh-poohed. Excuse the pun.

Now it may seem that we just have bad home karma. Or it may seem like we’re just hard to please. And you may or may not be right about one and/or the other. But I prefer the more optimistic viewpoint - that Ryan and I have made it through 10+ moves and a whole ‘lotta poo all over our brand new, sustainably-sourced wood floors. And we’re still in love.

But that brings me back to the point that I’m trying to make here, which is that we also love our new home. And we thank our earlier speed bumps and Mount Everests for bringing us to it. And we like to think of it this way: If that pigeon had not died right there on our doorstep, we might not have found our wrap-around-porch and brezeway house. See? Unless you’re the pigeon, everything works out.

But this also brings me to my next point. And that is that animals just know a good place to live when they smell one.

I was convinced of this fact on the day that we took ownership of our breezeway home. Once again I found myself arriving on the property to try out our new keys. But this time, as I turned the corner up the street to our just acquired property, I saw a mama doe and her brand-new, spotted-all-over fawn sun bathing on our lawn. (I swear, she was so new she was still wet and yes, I’m fairly certain they were sun bathing). I gazed in awe at the pair for a moment, before mama deer figured her baby had enough vitamin D for the day. They disappeared into the trees behind our yard.

Now, I admit I’m no omen expert, but I’m pretty sure dead pigeons are bad signs and baby deer are good ones.

And there’s other signs of good things to come…

Example #2: Beautiful flowers growing despite no care

{Roses outside the kitchen window}

{Happy daisies in groups behind the back porch}

We don’t live in the house yet (due to the work going on inside) and yet the flowers continue to grow, bloom and thrive! Perhaps (as a master gardener once told me), some flowers do well with a little neglect, but I’m pretty sure the flowers in our yard are simply living on love. (Kind of like the rice experiment in Emoto Masaru’s book, Hidden Messages in Water: rice exposed to loving, kind words fermented into sweet rice as opposed to going bad).

And even though we’re loving our house from afar, there’s a lot of love in the neighborhood (not just from the deer).

Example #3: Our neighbors are warm and welcoming

The neighborhood already had a special “feel” but feelings can be deceiving.

Not in this case.

Within days of taking ownership of our home, the entire neighborhood had come over to introduce themselves. I don’t mean just one or two neighbors, I mean practically the entire neighborhood. On one day, there was even a most thoughtful little gift on our doorstep (thank goodness it was not of the pigeon or poo kind).

{Zoe and Finley discover a handmade card and a bag of sidewalk chalk, tied in a bow}

{A close up of the simple gift that meant so much}