Tour of Homes from 17 Years of Army Life

One of my favorite parts of this strange life we lead is choosing my next house. With each one, I say, “Such and such a thing is killing me. Our next house will DEFINITELY have….

-sidewalks

-a bigger master bedroom closet

-4 bedrooms

-more kitchen cabinets!!

It’s always something.

I love getting to see new places and try new set-ups. I don’t even mind redecorating, though it takes so long to get a house looking the way I want it to look that it’s always time to move before I finish.

My mother-in-law is wanting to do a project, which she probably saw on Pinterest. She asked me to dig out a photo of all the houses we’ve lived in for this project.

This is no easy task, but it got me thinking. It’d be fun to do a blog post about all the different houses we’ve occupied. Some of them weren’t “houses” exactly, but they were our homes, for a little while.

2002 Alabama

We got married in 2002, but Alan was away at training for most of that time. I was the weird-o married Resident Assistant for my very last semester of college.

This dear old dormitory is now slated for ye olde wrecking ball. A new Tutwiler Hall is being built “adjacent” to the current building.

2003 Texas

Our first house together!

There is no excitement like moving into your very first home together as a married couple. The sad cloud that hung over us was that on our drive into town, they announced on the radio that Alan’s unit was headed straight for Iraq. This was 2002. We weren’t even in Iraq yet. I was devastated.

Thankfully, we were able to squeeze in 3 blissful months together in this house before Alan was shipped out.

My crowning achievement was that flower bed. It was no longer puny under my watch. When we moved out only 18 months later, it was a glorious bed of petunias surrounding the bushes. The move-out inspector was so impressed, he didn’t charge me a dime for the giant bleach stain on the hallway carpet. I was never good at carpet.

2004 Texas

Alan came home a year later and wanted to move onto the military base, so off we went, from our beautiful civilian 3 bed, 2 bath duplex, across the street from my best buddy, over to this old, ugly 2 bed/1 bath duplex on the base. As you can probably tell, I wasn’t thrilled about it, and I never felt like I truly belonged in it, but whatever. Another year, another rental.

2005 Arizona

We were ecstatic to receive orders to move out west in 2005 because if Alan had stayed where we were, he would’ve gone straight back to Iraq in 2005/2006.

This house holds a special place in our hearts, largely because Joshua was born there, but also because it was a fun place to live. It had shag carpet, no air-conditioning, a pebble yard, and a pool in the backyard. I’m telling you, I’d still want to live there. I can’t even explain it.

2006-2008 Back to Alabama

Oh, 2006, what a year! You couldn’t pay me to repeat it, but that’s another story. We had summer orders again, so we bought a house in Texas. Alan called me on my plane trip to the new house to tell me, “I have new orders. We’re headed back to the South instead. Not Texas.”

We flipped house A, crashed at Alan’s parents’ house for a month, and then rented a house in location B, a lovely split foyer that came with a swing set in back. This lovely split-foyer felt humongous, just the two of us and our baby.

Then along came baby #2, so this house has a special place in our hearts as well. It was a terrible job, though. Alan was never home. Then we went from that job to another Iraq deployment. This time Alan would be gone for 15 months! I decided to move closer to my parents. Parenting 2 babies by myself was more than I could handle, and I knew it.

Off we went again…

2008-2009 South Alabama

Living near my parents for the deployment was a dream. Dad cut my grass, Mom and Dad babysat all the time, plus I had somewhere to go hang out–my parents’ house! But at the end of the day, we still had our pretty “deployment house” to come home to.

2009-2011 Washington, D.C.

The year of two delightful snow blizzards: 2009 and 2010, we lived in D.C. Actually, we lived in this little town house until 2011. I felt crammed, and I was longing for a single family home, so we relocated to the suburbs of north Virginia.

D.C. was such an adventure for us. As a family of four, we were fairly portable and enjoyed traveling the city together. We also hosted dozens of friends and family members who wanted to see the capitol city without spending $400/night for a hotel room, and we loved hosting everyone. I’d do that all over again in a heart beat. Our D.C. years are full of fond memories.

I can explain about that chair. It was just the four of us during those years. Alan and I had put Joshua and Caleb to bed in the respective bedrooms, and we thought they were asleep. We were downstairs playing Ticket to Ride, I believe. When the game was over, Alan went upstairs first and found this marker mayhem chair mess in the office. It was quickly discovered that Caleb, age 2, was obviously not asleep at all, and during his insomnia he had tiger striped the chair, himself, the floor, the wall, and popped all the keys off my laptop keyboard. Yep. All in one night. Back then, we weren’t sure how we would ever survive that little boy, but now it all makes for smiley memories.

What did he have to say for himself that night? He said, “I a tiger!! Rawrrrrr!”

2011-14 Virginia

Living in North Virginia, we continued to host friends and family who came to visit. Plus, we entered the world of being elementary school parents. Also, Alan went to Afghanistan for a while.

We loved our Virginia neighborhood and lived there longer than any house we’ve ever lived in. The house and yard were both spacious, and we fell in love with the community.

2014-16 California

I cannot find a picture of what the front of the house looked like. I’m officially starting a new tradition of photographing our houses, but if you look across the street in this photo you will see another house with an upstairs balcony. That was what our house looked like too.

This was our 3rd military housing experience, and our best one by far. This privatized Navy house is the biggest home we’ve ever lived in. The neighborhood was gorgeous, and our master bedroom had a balcony on it! Not only that, but if you looked through the bushes at just the right angle, you could catch a glimpse of the Pacific Ocean. Such a dreamy place to live for our two home school years!

2016-18 Georgia

Desperate to be done home schooling, we drastically down-sized in Georgia so that we could afford good private school tuition. Still, I loved that house. It had only 3 bedrooms, yes, but the rooms were large, all of the rooms in this house were huge, the master bath was amazing, and it had a fun backyard with a massive hill in it.

2018-19 Back to Virginia

Now that we’ve left the Virginia house I am convinced that the split foyer house is the BEST house for us. I know many of you think I am crazy and that we need a bigger home, but we do not. We needed more closet space and more kitchen cabinets, but that could be done if you own the home.

Why it was perfect: All of the main living space is on one floor. It makes getting kids ready for school in the morning a billion times easier than our current situation. The boys will also tell you that they loved that house. All split foyers have a massive downstairs room, which our kids used for video games, and yet they never felt far away. I still knew what was going on down there.

We’ve lived in split foyers twice, once in Alabama and then this Virginia one, and I gotta say, I think they are surprisingly functional.

2019 Maryland

I appreciate our house here. We actually bought this one because we expect to stay a while, but I miss how compact our last two houses were. Now I’m back to trying to figure out where everyone is. You hear people say often in our house, “Where are you???” Ugh.

How I miss our 3 bedroom in Georgia and our split foyer. I don’t think we will be one of those families who retires to a mini mansion. Give me a nice ranch with a screened in porch and a neighborhood with sidewalks. Oh, and of course, tons of kitchen cabinets.

Now just for fun, here’s a bonus question for long time blog readers and family. Can you tell which state the house in this next photo was in?