The searches all began in two ways. One was the good old internet. We looked at literally thousands of homes online. In an effort to not be restricted geographically, we were open to 13 cities or towns. With that number of towns, you can easily believe my comment about looking at thousands of homes over that two year period. The other method was hunting for "For Sale" signs in yards everywhere we drove. The stupid thing is, even though we have been in our new home for over a year now, I still spin my head once in a while when I catch a glimpse of a for sale sign in a yard. Brother, how easily one can be conditioned!
If we found a home online or via yard sign, we would do a thorough "drive by" to see if the location, appearance, and style met our criteria. Sometimes if the home was empty, we would walk around the yard and peek in the windows. We did our best to not bother our realtor unless a home had serious potential.
If our efforts deemed a home a possible candidate, we would make an appointment with our realtor to go see it.
Here is the what we discovered. I would guess that once we got inside and got a good look around, 80% of them were not what we thought we would see based on the outside. Many were down right horrible while others may have needed thousands of dollars of work to make them what we thought we would see when we went inside. I imagine many of you reading this have experienced the same thing. In a broader look, don't we often find that to be true with things we buy today. Appliances, tools, cars, and so on?
Recently, that experience took me to a more personal place than just house hunting. I wondered if I am presenting a great exterior to the world around me. Do people feel comfortable with me based on superficial, outside stuff but would be disappointed if they got to know me deeply? Have we spruced up the outside to look nice like every other person on the street as we do with houses? Like those houses, if we let people inside would they find a mess and be disappointed?
I have been working a lot on the yard of the new place, sprucing things up to make it look nice. While doing that, I thought this is the time of year we spruce things up, maybe we should take a good look at our inside us, make a to do list and do some sprucing up there to. Sometimes things are obvious but how often are we surprised what we find when we dig around in the dusty and dark part of the basement? If we look hard and peek into the dusty corner of our lives, we might be surprised at some junk we need to deal with or toss away.
This could be bad habits, a fight with a friend that is still not resolved, not forgiving a person for things of the past and even asking for forgiveness for things we may have done. We all may have a thing or two we have kept in a box for years and today might just be the day to clean it up.
We all love our homes and yards and want them to be the best they can be - inside and out. Why not love ourselves with the same enthusiasm and do some work? I am talking to myself too, you know. It is not a particularly great thing to think about but once we have done some housework on ourselves, we can step back and feel that same sense of pride as we do for our yard.
Let's give it a try and we might find cleaning up some stuff might just might make it a little easier for us to love ourselves and love those around us.