5245

"This house is perfect for where we are right now."  I can still see Eugene leaning against the counter in the kitchen that was not yet ours making this statement about the house we were considering purchasing.  It was May 2007.  Reagan was about 18 months old.  Tripp, just a twinkle in his father's eye.  The housing market was booming.  It was time to sell the house in Hollands Crossing and move into something with a little more space and a lot more trees.  Sure, our first home in Apex was lovely and our neighbors flat out wonderful.  But who doesn't dream about a little more lawn, maybe some granite counter tops, hardwood floors, and a little room to grow, or at least grow our family.  And so we bought it, 5245 Lake Edge Drive.  And now we call it home.

When your company offers you a transfer to a foreign country one of the biggest questions you face is what to do with your home.  Do you sell it?  Do you keep it?  We've been back and forth since day one.  Initially, the feeling was dump the house.  5245, as spectacular as it is, is an older home by Triangle-area standards where most houses are bright, shiny and new construction.  This home was built in 1993; it's hardly bright, shiny and new.  And it has it share of issues, problems, hiccups.  Like in November 2007, just after four short months of moving in, the downstairs furnace decided to blow cold air, all day, all night  and not shut off, or let us shut it off, until we just had to pull the fuse.  Nothing says new home like an immediate investment in a brand new downstairs heating and cooling unit!  Then there is this.  Remember this picture?  Yes, that is a big, black snake on our roof!  Why is it there?  Why to try to get at the bats that were nesting in our attic of course!  Yes, it's true, we had to tolerate bats living in our attic all of last summer because there were babies and you can't exterminate them.  You have to wait until the little dears can fly out and then you get a wildlife company to seal up all the cracks and crevices, clean up and sanitize, and give you the thumbs up, all clear and one year warranty that they won't return.  Then there is the fireplace that wouldn't light, the 40 foot tree that cracked in half, the leaking skylights in the bathroom, the busted hot water tank that produced dirty water in our bathtub, the squirrels nibbling on our siding, the massive spring on the garage door that failed, the copperhead snake in the garage and have I mentioned the genius that laid white tile AND white grout in our shower?  So, like I said, our first thought was to sell 5245.

But there have been those days where I wake up and from the comfort of my bed watch through the trees of our wooded lot, the neighbors walking dogs and the school bus chugging down the street.  I can hear the squirrels rolling nuts down our roof and I'm smitten with the charm of our neighborhood.  Or I think about those many summer nights where Gene and I put the kids to bed and spend the evening sitting on the screened in porch, talking about where our life has been, where it's going.  It's so easy to grow content with the things you have, to forget those charming little features that made me love this house.  Like the built in bookshelves, the plentiful storage of the walk up attic (now bat-free!), the french doors, the huge rhododendron in the backyard.  I can see Tripp and Reagan running through the massive leaf piles in the fall and picking tomatoes in the garden in the summer.  Some days I think, yeah, this is where we need to be.  We need to keep this house.  This house needs us to keep it.

But when we really think it through, like logical people, we know that we can't be halfway around the world and still own a piece of property here.  There has been so much maintenance, so many things have gone wrong, how on earth would we handle that from Hong Kong?  And the truth is, though 5245 may have been "perfect for where we are right now" back in 2007, looking forward to 2014, we are going to be in a different place in our lives.  I realize that it's not letting go of the house that bothers me, it's letting go of my "American dream".  A house symbolizes what so many people dream of, what so many people work so hard for, what we have worked so hard for.  How do you just throw your hands in the air and walk away from that?  Selling the house, means that we literally have no home base.  We have no home to call our own.  Nowhere to "have to" return to.  It makes us modern-day nomads.  Just wanderers setting up camp temporarily in Asia.

So as scary, confusing and difficult as it may be, we have to go with our gut. 5245 Lake Edge Drive will be up for sale shortly.  And we hope someone will come along and see it and think it's just perfect for where they are right now.