31 Days of Loving My Rental

Maybe you've heard of this little thing The Nester has done every year for the past few years in which she writes about one topic for 31 days- all of October.  She also invites all other bloggers to join her.  Last year, I was too new to embark on anything like this, but this year, I feel up to the challenge.  Race season is running down (haha... see the pun?) & I have a little more time to write, so I thought it'd be a good idea.  I often feel like my writing skills need practice, so I think that writing about this one topic for 31 days will be a great exercise for me in writing, developing ideas, researching, and just preparing & optimizing my bloggy posts in general.

I kicked around a few ideas of what topic to cover for the month, but the one I kept coming back to was this, 31 Days of Loving My Rental.

Remember when we decided that we were going to stay in our rental home for another year?  Our lease will be up again in February, and at that time, we will have lived in our rental home for 4 years.  There are a lot of things that I don't like about our rental house.  There's a lot of things that I don't like about renting in general.  So when we decided to continue to stay in our house, I was determined to bring myself around to loving our rental home, or at least liking it.  I have found that while there are some negatives to renting our house that I kept bumping into, there are also a lot of positives.

For example, my husband & I were walking our dog the other day talking about how I had wanted to move two years ago, and then again I wanted to move last year, but we didn't either time.  We thought about how two years ago, all the places we looked at were at least $200 more per month than the place we're currently in.  Add that up.  By staying in our house, we will have saved about $5000 over that two year period of time.  That's kind of a giant chunk of change, at least in my world.

Now, some new problems have come up that are making us almost certain that when our lease ends, we will be moving this time.  But, we will still be moving into another rental.  It's just where we're at right now in our lives.  I would love to own a house, I would love to be able to settle somewhere "for serious", but we just can't right now, so I need to make the best of it.

I have a lot to say about rental homes & life as a renter, so if you're a renter too, I really hope that you will join me on my 31 day path!