08/12/2026
There are closings that feel like a celebration… and then there are closings that feel like saying goodbye to a piece of yourself. 🏡💛
This one was both.
For more than 65 years, this little home in Plainfield belonged to my family.
My grandparents purchased it in 1961. My mom and her siblings grew up there. My Gaga hosted holidays there, with 18 of us squeezed around card tables in the garage because the kitchen couldn’t hold us all. 😂 My cousins, siblings, and I spent countless hours there growing up.
It was the house where I took my first steps.
And years later, it was the house where I watched my own child take their first steps in the very same living room. 🥹
But this home was more than the backdrop for our family’s memories. Throughout the years, it became a place to land when life changed.
After my Papaw passed away and my parents divorced, my mom, siblings, and I moved there with my Gaga.
Years later, at 22, I found myself back there again. What I thought would be a temporary chapter turned into nearly 15 years of calling it home.
It was home when I met my husband, and where we started our family and brought our little girl home from the hospital. We poured our hearts into refreshing the house that had already given our family so much. We pulled up layers of old flooring, stripped away years of wallpaper, replaced windows, furnace/ac, appliances, updated bathrooms, and tackled more projects than I could ever list. 🤍
And when my sister later found herself walking through a major life transition, the house became a safe place for her, too.
Again and again, this home seemed to say, “Come in. You’re safe here.”
My Papaw’s fingerprints are everywhere, too. From the workshop he built in the backyard to the trees he planted, pieces of him are still woven into the property. He was a WWII bomber pilot, a POW, later served in Vietnam, and lived a life that taught our family so much about freedom, resilience, family, and home.
As we prepared the house for this final sale, we even discovered pieces of our family’s history tucked away in the attic, including letters from the Army notifying my great-grandmother that her son had been captured during WWII, photographs dating back to the 1800s, military memorabilia, and family treasures we had never seen before.
It felt like the house had one last story to tell us. 💛
And then came the part I had been dreading…
Closing day.
After more than six decades, our family’s chapter in this home officially came to an end.
But I couldn’t have imagined a sweeter next chapter.
A young couple beginning their own family now gets to call it home, and the husband is a veteran. Knowing another veteran will care for the home my Papaw loved feels incredibly special. I think he would be pretty happy about that. 🇺🇸
Being the Realtor involved in closing a home with this much history was unlike any transaction I’ve ever been part of.
Because this wasn’t just real estate.
It was Gaga and Papaw’s house.
It was family dinners and holidays.
It was sleepovers and card tables.
It was first steps.
It was fresh starts.
It was a refuge.
It was home.
And in so many ways…
it truly is the home that built me. 🏡
It was bittersweet to close this chapter, but there’s something incredibly comforting about knowing that after taking care of our family for more than 65 years, this house gets to do what it has always done best:
Become home for someone who needs it. 💛
Here’s to the family who gets to write the next chapter. May these walls hold just as much love, laughter, safety, and life for you as they did for us. 🏡✨
🎨 And a special thanks to my friend, Julie at Sojourn City Co, for taking old photos of this home with Gaga & Papaw’s flowers and turning those into a priceless hand painted keepsake that I’ll treasure forever. 💕
