Two years in, our house finally feels settled

This October marks two years since Bernie and I moved in together at our current place in Newton. It’s been a wonderful change for me, living with Bernie after spending almost seven years long distance, and into a better space that feels more like mine after eleven years in my old place with roommates. I’ve been very happy there, but it’s only recently that we’ve finally reached a point where I feel like we have the house arranged and furnished the way I wanted it.

For a long while now, my dad has been planning to downsize to be able to move out of and sell our childhood home. It’s been slow, since he was still working full time until this past summer, and I think the emotional weight of moving onto the next life stage has had significant impact. But he offered me my pick of a lot of the furniture, and there were a number of pieces I wanted to move up to my place. The biggest one was, of course, the library shelves, a beautiful set of eleven wood segments that held Dad’s collection from the Easton Press, handsome leather bound books he’s been building up over the course of the last twenty years. I’ve always loved them— I think Dad went to the trouble with them so my brother and I could grow up around beautiful books and develop our respect for them —so I’d been hoping to bring them North since I moved.

The problem had been, however, convincing Dad to just let Bernie and I move them. I think he still thinks of me as the child I used to be who was too spacey to take good care of her things, so he kept trying to get us to use professional movers. Which then were all either too cheap and do a bad job or too expensive and screw us. It took a confluence of events plus Bernie carefully explaining a moving plan before he let us just do it ourselves. However, when he finally changed his mind, we weren’t expecting to do all that labor the weekend we went up to visit, so the enormity of the job threw our schedule into a tailspin we’re only just now digging ourselves out of. But it means we finally, finally, have the shelves we’ve been saving space for in our house for the last two years.



They’re really beautiful, particularly the set we’ve filled only with the nice leather books and tasteful art objects we’ve put in the living room. It makes for such a wow when you first turn in from the doorway. I’ve always had this fantasy of living in a home that didn’t make me feel like a college student just figuring things out, and finally the living room space fits that.

The other shelves are in my office and Bernie’s on the second floor; we don’t have any one space big enough to display them all together the way my parents did. But we needed the extra storage space, as even with the new books, the shelves enabled us to unpack some our of own books that had been sitting in boxes since we moved in. It feels good to have finally dealt with that stuff.

It also helped me make the upstairs room that is supposed to be more office feel more comfortable and complete. But I will talk about that in my next entry.