Home

This past January my husband and I moved into our new home in Ankeny, which was quite the process. The inside of our house has really started to look and feel like a home. Since we built in the winter, we were unable to finish everything on the outside of the house. We are just now finishing up. Yesterday, they painted the outside of our house. All day at work I was so excited to drive home and see how wonderful it looked. I had spent many months dreaming and looking for the perfect house colors. I found those colors one afternoon as I was driving through one of my favorite neighborhoods in Des Moines, Sherman Hills.

Sherman Hills is filled with many beautiful homes. It is a few blocks behind my work building, so I frequently like to walk through the neighborhood during my lunch time. Some of the houses in the neighborhood date back to the 1870's. The houses are very colorful and full of character. I love meandering through the streets, while noticing all the fun details and hues of these homes. One of my personal favorites is the Victorian style house in the picture. It was built at the turn of the 20th century. It is a beautiful goldish brown color with a light yellow trim and black accents. I love the way this house looks, so I decided to try and match the paint colors for our new house. And I did find paint colors that matched exactly! Tommy gave the color names to the painter and we were ready to see our new home!

All day yesterday I was anticipating how wonderful our newly painted house would look. On the bus ride home I even tried to get a glimpse of our house from the interstate. I finally caught a little glimpse of our house! Or was it our house -it looked horribly like a bright orange blob! Maybe the sun just made it look funny that far away I told myself. Once at the bus stop I quickly got in my car and drove towards our home. As I was driving up our street, I couldn't believe my eyes. There was a giant orange pumpkin on top of our hill -and it was our house. What an eye sore! I didn't look anything like the beautiful house downtown! And the color was much more orange than the little swatch seemed to portray. The bright orange color of our house was only accentuated by the mute grays and dull cremes surrounding our house. Maybe in Sherman Hills this house would have fit in better with all the other lively colored homes, but in our neighborhood it looked, quite ridiculous! I wanted to cry! I had made a terrible mistake and would not have to live with it. What had I been thinking! Of course these colors would look ridiculous in our conservative neighborhood. I quickly went insides, maybe some of the neighbors still didn't know that this was my house. How embarrassing to live in a pumpkin!

My friend Patti came over later that night and calmed me down a bit. I decided to give the house another look in the morning, after I had a been able to sleep on it. When I got up in the morning, to my dismay, the house still looked as orangish brown as ever. I decided our house just didn't have the right style to pull these colors off. And maybe our house didn't look bad in general, but it really did look horribly out of place in our development. Thankfully we are working with a very generous painter, who is going to work with us on repainting the house for a reasonable price. Earlier today I was expressing my frustration with Tommy about how the house just didn't turn out how I had imagine. I was so disappointed. I had been on the look out for several weeks before I found my perfect house colors (I guess now you could call them not so perfect colors). Since finding them, I was looking forward to seeing how they would only accent our already lovely home. And priding myself on being an artist, I was thoroughly disappointed in myself. I didn't want to admit my largest painting faux pas to date. As I was telling him all this, Tommy, thankfully, reminded me, that our house isn't really our HOME. Amen to that because I messed up big time! I'm sure the home God has prepared for both of us is far more perfect and beautiful than anything I could ever come up with!