Find part one of this post Staircases & Big Steps here.
In 2009 we took a bold step of faith: we left what we thought would be our forever home in Portland and moved to a small town in Washington to start a church. If you’ve followed Love the Home You Have, you know about our many moves and what led us here. The Inspired Room began in our 1930s English Tudor in Portland, and for the last six years we’ve lived in Washington while running The Inspired Room and serving the church.
The move was harder than we expected. Portland had been home. Our family was separated — our middle daughter Courtney stayed behind to finish school, our oldest daughter Kylee was in college in Oregon, and our son came with us. We arrived in a place where we knew no one and spent years rebuilding a life and getting established. Slowly, we found our footing and began to feel settled.
Eventually Courtney and Kylee moved to Washington for school (yay!), but they live in Seattle, over an hour away (boo). We were grateful they were close enough to visit regularly, but not close enough for the everyday togetherness we longed for.
Fast forward to today: so much has changed. Courtney and I now work full time together running The Inspired Room. We love working as a team, but she still lives more than an hour away by ferry. We commute back and forth as often as we can, but the time, cost, and logistics of ferry travel take a toll on our creative energy and limit the time we could spend collaborating in person.
Kylee wants to help and be involved too (we want her to be part of things), but she and her husband both work full time at Amazon. Their schedules make it difficult to collaborate during the week, so any meaningful time together is often limited to a few hours on weekends or evenings.
It’s natural for kids to go off to college, get married, and start their own lives — even though it tugs at your heart. There’s something special about having family nearby when you genuinely enjoy being together. After six years of sacrifice to make this life possible, we now yearn for spontaneous weeknight dinners, impromptu projects around the house, and casual Saturday coffee and shopping trips together.
More than anything, there’s some sadness that our son didn’t grow up closer to his sisters for much of his childhood. Thankfully, all three kids (and Kylee’s husband Lance) have remained very close. We’re grateful for their influence in his life and for the quality time they’ve managed to share despite years of travel across the water.
Our son has grown up here — from an adorable eight-year-old to a fourteen-year-old young man — and it’s felt like his childhood flew by. As he finishes eighth grade and prepares for high school in the fall, we realized we still have the chance to give him closer, more frequent time with his siblings for the next four years if we move to Seattle.
Oh my heart. When my husband and I let the possibility of moving closer to our daughters sink in, there was no other choice. As a mom, I want this for him for these next critical years more than anything. Our girls want it for our family too.
I love the home we’ve created here and wish with all my heart that we could stay and enjoy it for years. That was our plan. Walking through rooms I helped build brings a pang of sadness at the thought of leaving. Still, there’s a missing piece to my heart while our family remains spread out. If we take this leap and move, we can bring our family closer again after six years apart — and that thought gives me peace about the path ahead.
At first I worried whether our son would want to switch schools. Moving and adapting is hard for kids. We had him shadow a potential new school to see how he’d feel, and to my relief he liked it. One fear eased.
Moving to Seattle won’t be without stress. Housing there is expensive, and the market is competitive. We want to be within a 15-minute drive of our girls, so we’ve narrowed our neighborhood options, but we don’t know what kind of house we’ll find in our price range. That uncertainty is scary.
Another change is how our routine would flip. Our church is here and my husband is dedicated to pastoring it. If we move, he would take on the commute required for meetings and church responsibilities while the girls and I would have more weekdays together to invest in our business with less commuting. We would still be at church on Sundays, keeping our church family a priority. Puget Sound can make commuting tricky, but the ferry ride is beautiful and peaceful, which helps.
What eases my worry is knowing this move isn’t just about a different house or neighborhood. It’s about moving to our family. That goal makes the challenges worth it. We don’t know exactly which neighborhood we’ll choose or what house we’ll buy, and we have no grand plans for a perfect home. We just know that wherever we land, we’ll turn any house into a home because being together is what matters most.
There’s more to the story, and I’ll share the rest another time. I’ll want to write about all the emotions that come with leaving this house and starting again. For now, thank you for reading and for joining me on these home adventures — you’ve been the best company through it all.