Home Sweet Home

How fast time flies. I've just recently realized that we've been living in our own little home for more than a year now. The husband and I are proud homeowners of a two-bedroom, one-toilet-and-bath and two-story townhouse in peaceful Lapu-Lapu City. We live in a gated subdivision with a basketball court, a multi-purpose hall, and have a one-car garage. We live five minutes away from a hospital and a modest shopping mall (it's convenient when we run out of cooking oil or when we want a tub of ice cream in the evening after dinner), ten minutes away from the international and domestic airports and most importantly, ten minutes away from the beaches and resorts. A lot of people think we live far because we work in Cebu City and our daughter goes to a school - my high school alma mater - there too, but we have gotten used to it. By car, it takes us twenty minutes to get to work. When we have to take public transportation, we allot a good hour for moderate traffic and for the amount of time spent waiting for a jeepney or a tricycle.

We got this house through Pag-IBIG and with our own money with no help from both our parents. I love coming home to our space. All the townhouse units in our subdivision look exactly alike but we don't mind because we've really taken strides in making the inside of our home as personal as possible. We still have a long way to go, believe me, but we're not in a major hurry, and we're allowing this house to continue to evolve. Speaking of evolution, we, as its inhabitants, have also changed in a lot of ways.

I've learned to cook, for one. I wouldn't touch a skillet before and didn't even know how to turn the stove on. Now, during times when we're sans household help, we're not totally help-less, if you catch my drift. We don't go hungry and well, no one has poisoned anyone yet, so we're doing good, I should say. Our daughter is more sociable. She has playmates who are our neighbors, and since our unit is situated towards a dead-end street, we allow her to ride her bicycle outside in the afternoons because it's safe. The husband and I are more at peace too, and we rarely fight now.  We just love coming home to something that symbolizes how hard we've worked and how far we've come.

Our home improvement to-do list is still long but I think we'll be able to make great changes soon enough. Here are some things we have planned:

- have great storage units installed
We're talking kitchen cabinets, shelves, closets and racks.
- buy beds
We're sleeping on mattresses on the floor as of now. We'll get a nice queen-sized bed for the master's bedroom and a bunk or a pull-out bed for our little one.
- get the master's bedroom air conditioned
Our daughter's room is the room we air conditioned first. Ours will be next.

I also wanna buy a gas range - we only have a two-burner stove for now; a washing machine - our household help hand washes stuff for now or we send them to the laundry people; and an LED flat screen TV for the husband - just because I promised him we'll get this in December with a little help from our year-end bonuses.

Because we have a home to call our own, it doesn't feel painful to part with hard-earned money to spruce up our space. I mean, one probably wouldn't spend so much to improve a rented space, right? You don't really invest in something you don't own.

The husband and I are also thinking of investing in a condo unit in Cebu City but that's another entry altogether.

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