Home sweet home

For someone who already owns a home she loves, I sure spend a lot of time watching House Hunters, House Hunters International, My First Place, Property Virgins, and Selling New York. According to the buyers on some of those shows, my house is woefully inadequate. I don't have granite countertops. I don't have all that much closet space. I only have one bathroom (no granite, of course) and it's pretty small, with no fancy tile. And it's on the first floor, even though the bedrooms are upstairs, which seems to faze a lot of people, though I don't understand why. (It's a really quite convenient arrangement.) I don't have a fence or a big yard. I don't have a finished basement or a 2-car garage. In short, an awful lot of the buyers on those shows would turn up their noses at my little 100 year-old colonial with its tiny living room and no formal dining space.

But for all the beautiful, fabulous houses I see on those shows, I don't think I have yet seen a single house I could see myself living in better than my little red house. My kitchen cabinets are beautiful. My laundry situation is unmatched anywhere. (Right by the bathroom, where I tend to do most of my dressing and undressing anyway, and arranged so it separates the bathroom from the living space to provide privacy for people when others are in the living room.) My upstairs bedrooms are surprisingly spacious for a colonial from that era. And none of those swanky HGTV homes are walking distance to the ultimate cathedral of college basketball that is Allen Fieldhouse.

So maybe I watch all these shows to remind myself that I'm really pretty lucky to have the home I do. Even if it would be just a little bit nicer with a fence.