Home Sweet Home - Brady

As most of you probably know, I lived in Fort Wayne, Indiana for two years before I moved back to Chicago. I really loved our house there. It was set on about an acre and a half out in the country. It had a lot of character inside and really pretty plants and flowering trees in the yard. Because it was our first home, we got to pick out furniture specifically for it, so I just really liked how it all looked. Oh, and there were windows everywhere. In the summer, we never had to turn on the AC because we could open up and turn on our fans and stay plenty cool with the cross breezes. It was also really nice at night to be able to hear the insects and trees and even coyotes sometimes.

I'm really happy to be living in Chicago again, but for a long time I wasn't loving our condo as much as I liked our Fort Wayne house. The place itself is great - we have cool exposed brick, a high slanted ceiling in our living room, hardwood floors, a balcony, lots of light - but the way our furniture looked in it bugged me. I always felt like there was too much going on...that the couch and chairs and table and art on the walls and everything else from our old place looked like too much of a hodgepodge here.

The last few weeks or so, though, I've really started to get into it. I moved around some of the furniture, and took a couple of paintings and photos off the walls to make it all simpler. We bought a couple of new pieces of furniture. And today we planted flowers and herbs on our balcony.

It's made me think about some of the things I love about this particular apartment. For example, I really like, believe it or not, when I can hear our neighbors talking (we've got quite the singer somewhere near here) or construction going on or even cars honking. I like that density - knowing there are lots of people close by. I also love being able to walk out our front door, down the stairs, and out the gate and having access to anything I could need - a drug store, a coffee shop, a bus or train to a different neighborhood, just about any kind of restaurant you can think of, etc. - just blocks away. This is another weird one, but our washer and dryer are in a closet in our bedroom, and I like falling asleep to the sound it makes. I also like our neighbors. We've gotten to know many of them personally - sometimes I feel like I live on Sesame Street. I love, of course, that Lake Michigan is three blocks away. I like the shady street that we live on. And I like that we're on the third floor - sometimes it feels like a treehouse to me.

I still miss our old house a lot. And there are still plenty of things I'd like to do to this place when we have the time and money and energy. But I've been really happy here these past few weeks and am appreciating the little quirks that make our apartment special.