Sold!

A few weeks ago I wrote about our painstaking process of deciding where to live.  I say painstaking only because I caused Mike a lot of pain. 

Headaches.  High demands.  Histrionics.

He estimates that he spent 13 hours a week canvassing Redfin, Windermere and Zillow to find us the perfect place to buy.  He obsessed.  He compared.  There were spreadsheets, listing print-outs, and saved “Favorites.”

Guess how many hours I spent each week?  Hint: it’s the same number of hours I spend watching Star Trek.

To me, online research holds the same appeal as voluntarily attending a life insurance seminar.  To Mike, online research is like crack cocaine laced with ecstasy.  So, we agreed it only made sense for him to handle that part of the process.

Now imagine the ensuing scenario when Mike has filtered through hundreds of listings to bring me to two condos/houses that pass his intense selection process, and I walk in the door and the first thing out of my mouth is, “Oooh, I don’t know if I can live with that light fixture.”

For the rest of my life I’m not sure I will be able to match the look of apoplectic frustration on my husband’s face. 

The truth is that he and the realtor only showed me beautiful places to buy, all of which were entirely livable (except one glaring exception, which I will only say was inhabited by a creature who had no desire to see the floor, dispose of food or empty the litter box…but I digress).

I think that was the problem, actually.  I trusted that Mike’s standards were the same as mine, so differenciating the potential places really came down to details. 

I ended up trusting him so much that when he said “Let’s make an offer” on a condo I had only spent five minutes inside, I said “OK.”  And when that offer was unexpectedly accepted, and I realized I was going to own something that had not been validated by my control-freakiness, I didn’t panic; I celebrated.

I hadn’t relinquished my control to Mike, entirely; I had more privately given control to God, saying, in essence, “Please figure this out for us because I am going to have a minor heart attack or a major stroke before it’s over if You don’t.”  And He did.

Just like when I committed to Mike and felt the finest freedom of my life, I had that same rush of release when we committed to buying the condo.  It reminds me of one of my favorite quotes of all time, and I’m not at all embarrasssed that it’s from a Starbucks cup:

“The irony of commitment is that it is deeply liberating; in work, in play, in love.  The act frees you from the tyranny of your internal critic, from the fear that likes to dress itself up and parade around as rational hesitation.  To commit is to remove your head as the barrior to your life.”  Anne Morris

So…we’re commited.  Last Thursday, November 12th, we closed on a condo in Kirkland.  Yes, the location question has been answered and the Reph’s will soon be Eastsiders. 

…with a pretty kitchen.  Any woman worth her salt knows the kitchen is the heart of the home, so if that doesn’t make you happy, it doesn’t matter if the rest of the place is gilded in gold.

While we will ache for Seattle in more ways than we even know, we are sure that Kirkland is right for us, right now.  My commute to work reached nearly 20 miles each way recently, and from Kirkland it will only be eight.  Mike loves his job in Bellevue and wants to create more community in an area where both our work and church reside. 

Of course, downtown Seattle is still only nine miles away.  It’s not as though we moved to Yakima.

And do we care that we’re cheesy?  Do we care that most people probably don’t still carry their wives over their thresholds?  No, no we do not. 

Why?  Because after going through tireless work to make something happen, we celebrate.