A First Home

You can look forward to a few guest posts this week while my work week gets hectic. I’m excited to introduce you to Tori! Today she’s sharing about her family’s experience moving out of their first home. Tori is a wife, mother and graphic designer based out of Idaho. She loves collecting wooden plates, watching Nora Ephron films, and spending time with her husband and 11-month old daughter.

As my husband and I prepare to move from the first place we’ve ever known as home together, feelings of excitement and sadness battle for first place in my queue of emotions.
While I recognize that a house is simply made of walls and a roof, I have grown to love our little home and the family that we have become while living here. It was where my husband and I truly became one, where we recently welcomed our first child. It is small and creaky, with battered baseboards and paint chipped walls, but right now, this old house is our home. And it is a place I will always want to remember.
Here are three pieces of art that will help you to remember the first place you called home:
1. Map of the town: During most moves, it’s not just your address that you’ll miss–it’s the local bakery down the street, the park across town, or just a street corner transformed by warm memories. These illustrated maps by Lena Corwin capture the little things that make a place special and will keep fresh in your mind all that you came to love about your old home.
2. Illustrated house portrait: When I look through pictures of the places I lived as a child, it’s rare that I come across an image of the outside of the home in its entirety. But whenever I do, I’m overcome with memories–long talks on the front stoop, sleepovers on the front lawn, learning to drive on that very street… The sweet details and small imperfections of these quirky prints by Rebekka Seale do such a wonderful job of capturing the story of your home created by those sweet moments.
3. Family photo shoot at home: My favorite family photos aren’t the ones where we are all wearing matching denim tops and forced smiles, whilst standing in an abandoned field at sunset. They are the ones taken during my daughter’s bath time, or while we’re unwinding in the living room after work. They are the images that capture our daily routine and the beauty of those small, everyday moments. These images of Naomi and Eleanor Davis from Rockstar Diaries, captured by Carissa Gallo, do just that.
This will be our first big move and I’m thinking of doing one of these (or maybe all three…) in each home we live in. How fun would it be to have a little gallery wall full of pieces like this, or even to just display them all on the mantle? Did you or do you plan to do anything to remember previous homes or towns? I’d love to know!
Tori

A Consideration

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Comments (18)

  • This is very cool. I also love these photos from Rockstar Diaries!

    @graylinsample
    yepindeed.com

  • I didn’t know you just had a baby…I’m new to your blog though. I’d love to see pics &/or hear about your motherhood experiences.

    We are moving out of a home we’ve lived in for 4 years. We love the place & have now decided to rent it out, which will be hard, in a way, knowing that someone else will be living there who won’t love it as much as we did. We’ve taken a lot of pictures of inside & outside, to remember the place we made so many memories.

    • Not sure if you were talking to me or Tori (who posted this as a guest poster!) I don’t have any children yet but love hearing other mothers’ experiences!

    • That’s always one of the hardest parts of moving for me! You will cherish those pictures, though!

  • Great ideas! I love the photos – I did a blog post AGES ago about all the places I’ve lived in since leaving home (there were about twenty of them…) and I was disappointed to realise I didn’t have pictures of all of them. This is a great reminder to take more pictures in my current home.

    • That’s such a good reminder. Photos are such a great way to bring back memories (at least for me)!

    • I did a post a while back about all the places I’ve lived, too! I feel like I’ve left a piece of me in each place and grown so much in each one, too. I will always call those places home and wish so much that I had pictures to put with those memories! It’s something that I’m trying to do better at now.

  • Great ideas. Pity I haven’t made more use of this before but might start doing it from now on.

    • I haven’t owned my own home yet but it does remind me to keep photos of apartments or areas I live in. Thanks for the comment!

  • LOVE the pictures and totally agree about family photos. The matching denim top pics turn out terrible! But now that I say this, I think I am going to try and make it look good.

  • I am going to do all 3 of them too. My boyfriend and I just bought our first house together. This house is a fixer upper (wish we would have known that when we bought it) like we already had to get a Buck County roofing company out to replace to the roof. As weird as it sounds I like that we are having house problems because when we think about our first house those problems are going to make us laugh. I am going to have to take more pictures through out the years, and do that with every house we get. We don’t have any kids yet but when we do I want to show them our first home! I also want to take a piece of the house with me, like if a piece of the banister breaks off or something like that and make a scrap book with pictures of the house. Thanks for sharing the great post!

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