Talk About Tuesday Home Edition ~ It's All About Perspective

You're going to have to stick with me on this one, because I promise it's going somewhere. I may just go around the world and back a few times, but there's a valuable lesson here. There was for me anyway.

Here's a sample picture of the military duplex in which we live. This is not the one we live in. I could not take a picture of the one we live in, because our screened in front porch is bad. Really bad. Really, really bad. Now housing takes a picture of one that is going to be the most flattering on their website and not make it look like the 60 year old dump home that it is.


We are six people living in a three bedroom duplex with one full bathroom and one half bathroom. Do you know how many showers six people take in two years in one bathroom? Well, when the painters don't use the right kind of paint in the bathroom, this is what happens:

Ceiling directly above the shower by the light/vent fan

Window Frame

Door Frame

These pictures are in no way the only places it's bad. These are simply representative. The walls around the top of the shower, over the door frame, and across about half of the ceiling look like the picture by the light/vent fan fixture.

Back when my husband first entered the military, if you had too much stuff to fit in your military housing, they'd put your overflow goods into storage for you until you moved again. Since the military has now gone to privatized housing, everything we knew and loved is gone. Forever. Now we sign a lease. And we have to give 30 days notice. For military housing. And when we sign this lease, we are signing that it is "adequate" housing, which means that they will no longer store your overflow goods, because they are providing you adequate housing and you signed your lease saying so. So the local shelter loves you. And knows you by name when you've only been here one month and you have no other friends.

Now this post had no four bedroom housing when we moved here, and we made the family choice to live on post for Hubby to be able to come home for lunch, be home quick after work, etc. It was our choice. That said, they built four bedroom housing for Hubby's rank and were finishing it up, and in the first part of this year I went and asked about getting on the list to move into it when it was completed. They told me we couldn't move into the four bedroom housing (unless our family situation had changed, meaning more kids) because we signed saying our housing was adequate, even though they had no four bedrooms at the time. Okay, angry me left, and ever since then I have driven a different way home so as not to drive by these new pretty homes, which is what we would get if we moved here brand new right now:

The irony of this whole thing is that we got a letter about two months ago (after Hubby had decided to retire anyway) and housing offered to let us move into one of the new three bedroom houses. Since I can be a little bit witty sarcastic, Hubby chose to go talk to them and get the scoop. Turns out they can't get enough people in their new housing to qualify for a bonus, so they were offering to let some of us in the existing housing move. But the four bedrooms were already filled, Hubby was retiring anyway, and we weren't going to help them out, because we would have had to move ourselves, and why would we do that for three months. That would be just a little bit silly.

I've been very bitter about this ever since my first visit into housing, thus the decision not to drive by that area. It was the same distance to drive the other way, so I used that as justification, but my family all knew why I drove home that way. A couple weeks ago I read this post about perspective, and it really made me think about how blessed I am to have a home for my family, even if it is not big enough for us, and certainly inconvenient, and not very nice. But it's a home, and it's temporary, both from an earthly perspective and for us right now. This was always temporary. And we're getting ready to move on, and I need to let it go. I've been coveting my neighbor's house, and that's wrong.

This week is the Talk About Tuesday Home Tour over at the Lazy Organizer. She's talking about her ceiling fans. Go and see what others are talking about too! It can't be as yucky as my peeling and chipping paint. So go have fun!