BnB : A Toast !

When Becky and I got together and the sparks were flying, we were laying about in my apartment, dreaming. We were talking about what kind of house we would like to have. Becky could not adequately describe her dream house, so she took my work notebook and a pen and said, "Something like this...". "The front would look like this with something going on around the side." She drew the front of the house on the top half of the page. Then she said, "The inside would be like this, (SKETCH, SKETCH, SKETCH), with the kitchen in the back, the living room in the front... like this." This she did on the bottom half of the page. We studied her sketch and said, "Yeah, that would be nice."

We forgot about the sketch in the notebook and went on with life. After some weeks we actually began going to open houses, "...just to see". The idea of getting a house together grew on us and our search grew more definite. We enlisted the aid of, Joel, an agent with the real estate company that managed the apartment house where we both now resided. Excitement gradually turned to frustration and then to outright surrender of the idea. Over a period of several weeks we covered a large swath of town from the suburbs to downtown and nothing worked out. One Sunday afternoon after our tour of the open houses on our list, we just drove around talking and thinking that maybe getting a house was not the right thing. We wandered across the river in to Argenta, the last place on earth either of us ever thought we would live, due to it's reputation as "Dog Town".

It had been years since I had been there and Becky had not been there since High School days. I knew there was a restoration effort going on there as I had worked on one of the first Main Street restorations years earlier. We were stunned at how the neighborhood had turned around. We talked to a young couple with a baby in a stroller and they said the neighborhood was terrific. So we drove around and soon found ourselves out front of a neat, little Craftsman house that had been re-done. There was a little 'for sale by owner' sign tacked up above the porch. I had to twist Becky's arm to call the number as she was sure the house was beyond our price range. (It was.)

Long story, short, I came across her forgotten, little drawing sometime around the day she closed on the house. "Look!", I said. "Here is your drawing and see how it matches the house exactly!" We were stunned. I haven't been able to locate that drawing, it must have gotten mixed up in the move, but it is a piece of magic which is our touchstone when we need inspiration.

Last Sunday we were talking about our desire to enclose the back yard for Brody and the cats to play in. We would also like to have a more private and landscaped area when we cook out. Remembering the magic of the drawing, I took pictures of the back. We sat on the bed and I sketched in a rough idea of the back yard on the photos. Here it is. We believe that Becky's drawing and our mutual belief brought about the circumstances that have us living in our dream house. It's silly, but dreams do come true. May your dreams come true for you!