When a Home Becomes A House(Part1)
Those of you who follow me on social media probably already know this, but I recently sold my home of the last 23 years in New Jersey. It was the home in which for the most part that my wife and I raised our two children. The house I occupied as my career flourished. The house where countless holidays and parties created fun and often beautiful moments and memories.
For the last nearly three years, I didn’t spend much time in the home. My son moved there with his wife while they had work done on their home. That was something that turned into a debacle, to put it mildly. Point about this, is that in that time, the home became less and less a home and more and more a house and eventually just an expense on an unemployed middle age guy.
To bring in some history about the house, we purchased it in 1998. I had been working at WNBC for a couple of years at that point and we now had two children, so we wanted to expand from a two bedroom townhouse to something bigger. The home was part of a new development, so it was exciting to have it built with all of our own personal choices.
As a city boy, I loved moving to the suburbs because of how much greener everything was. I would walk barefoot outside as much as I could and loved the feel of the grass under my feet. With my wife Nancy, we would plant vegetable & flower gardens. I preferred the vegetables, because I felt like you would actually reap what you sowed. Although that was a learning curve, as rabbits and deer often reaped before I did.
My son was nearly 9 and my daughter 4 years old when we moved into our home. It was one of the first to be built in the development. I remember looking through the various windows of the house and watching other homes sprout up all around us, seemingly from seeds in the ground. It was such a great time of newness and excitement to truly make something our own from scratch.
I can’t begin to tell you how much fun it was to invite old friends from Queens and Long Island to the house. Nancy and I were very proud of our house that I often referred to as “a townhouse on steroids”. As time went on we made other friends from the neighborhood as well as with parents from my son’s hockey team.
A few years later we put in a swimming pool which was my favorite place on a Saturday and Sunday morning, sipping coffee and reading the paper. Numerous BBQs and pool parties were enjoyed over the years and Nancy was a generous host to all.
A few years later my son became interested in the music industry and half of the basement of the home was converted to a recording studio. I spent many days holding my ears as he recorded various “scream-o” bands amongst many others. Some were occasionally palatable.
My daughter grew from pre-school to college in the time in that house and my son graduated college and eventually moved on out.
I would be remiss if I didn’t mention another very important member of making the house a home, Sir Charles, my first little boy dachshund. You can look back in previous blogs to get the details on that story.
In any event, I will not bore you with further details about the events that took place in the home, as time moved on and a family evolved together under the same roof. It’s a pretty common tale, albeit an important one.
Fast forward to May 2016 and the passing of my wife. Neither of my kids lived there anymore. I remember going back to the house after everything was done and put to rest. The eerie quiet. The emptiness. It may not have registered at the time but the home was beginning the process of becoming just a house again.
I hung in there for a couple of years splitting time between NYC and the house in NJ. It was not easy. Plus the fact that the show, Today in New York, was regularly going on at 4AM now meant I needed to be up by 1:15AM. Hence, during the week, I usually stayed at the house only a night or two at most.
When my son and his wife ran into a major problem with the home they purchased, I offered them my home while things were taken care of for them in their future place. Little did I know that would last for over two years. I primarily lived in the city at this time as my life was moving on from the past. The one thing that remained however, was the house in New Jersey. It was becoming a cloud hanging over my head. An albatross of sorts.
In going through the pandemic and another life altering period, I decided in February of this year it was time to pull the trigger on the house and sell it. I guess the good news was that everytime I went into the house I felt less and less connected to it. It stopped looking like and feeling like the home it was during the good times. It was time. The memories could never be taken away. Those moments for me and anyone else who shared the many gatherings in that home will never be forgotten. Nancy was certainly a large part of that.
So enough about the history. Now onto the experience of cleaning out 23 plus years of the lives of four individuals.
Well, that’s coming……in part 2 very soon.
As always if you made it this far thanks so much.
Sunshine Always!!!!
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