This is the beginning of the story.

Wait! What? You’re moving? Why?

We like our current neighborhood and love our current house. We live in an 1870s cottage and are as close as you can get to all the cultural highlights that Indianapolis has to offer. Our neighborhood is full of beautiful historic homes, tree-lined streets, brick sidewalks, and friendly neighbors.  Our house isn’t big by today’s standards, but we never minded. In fact, we liked that!  We thought that this would be the last house we ever bought.

So why are we moving to this!?!

It was a gradual journey that all started with having a baby, and not at all for the reason you might think (more space).  I think most people would agree that having a baby makes you refocus your life and causes you to take another look at how you spend your time and money.  It also forces you to think about the type of world you want your kids to live in. It becomes more difficult to ignore issues and realities that you were aware of but were able to ignore or push aside.  The short story is that we changed.  We found ourselves wanting to live in a neighborhood that reflected these changes.

To be even more specific, I’m pretty sure we are moving because of cloth diapers!  The decision to use cloth diapers with Lucy seems like a no-brainer to us now, but at the time we weren’t sure.  We did a lot of research. The more research we did, the more we stumbled across information that challenged other areas of our life. Cloth diapers logically led to little things like cloth napkins and ridding our home of chemical cleaners, but then led to big things…  like reducing our overall consumption of material goods. It didn’t stop there… our diet changed. We started with eliminating as many processed foods as possible from our diet. We became members of our local grocery store co-op and committed ourselves to supporting the local food scene as much as possible, even if that meant altering our budget. We seriously ramped up our intake of fruits and vegetables, practically eliminated our consumption of all meat, and stopped eating fast food completely. We became more aware of the money we spent and who gets our money. We chose to vote with our dollar as much as possible. We ditched cable TV along with Tivo and satellite radio. As silly as it seems now, giving up something little like cable TV seemed like a scary thing to do at the time.  But now we are actually free from TV and don’t miss it at all.  It actually feels liberating.

As we continued down this path we realized that we were too tied to money. We could afford our current lifestyle, but it didn’t allow for change, risk, or the ability to try something completely different. We figured that if we could cut our mortgage by more than half that it would open up other options in our life – like pursuing masters degrees, other job fields, or pursuing other interests that would otherwise be halted by our current budget. In fact, we could actually live on one income without drastically changing our standard of living.  In short, we decided that we didn’t want money to stand in the way of trying new things, experiencing life, or spending more time with our kids.

We were soon on a mission to find a way to live with less – less possessions, less commercialization, and less money.  We don’t need much to be happy and we feel liberated by the thought that we can take a step to reinvent our lives by downsizing.and avoiding the cycle of money and material consumption.  We want to jump OFF the ladder that we are always told we should be striving to climb. Leaving our perfect little house in our idyllic little neighborhood was not an easy decision, but we are confident that this new adventure is a big step in a new direction that we are excited to explore.

Now, about finding just the right house…

Follow our story by clicking on the next post: 10 Things we Love about Cottage Home