What Makes A Place Feel Like Home

This is topic I have had to figure out the past few years. After struggling with living in my parent's house (and not being able to get along too well with them due to Autism and later PTSD), trying to live on my own, and the occasional incidences where I had to live out of my car. I never felt safe, I never felt comfortable and never was sure if I would be kicked out. It took a few years before I got a more stable handle on where or what I consider 'home'.

Luckily, my home now is wherever my husband is. He makes me feel safe, loved, cared for, and listened to. We have been homeless, we have been broke, we have been jobless with the risk of losing our housing and many more struggles. Knowing that we are able to stick through it and be happy just having each other has made moving a lot easier.

Though now that we have two cats to support (yes, they are our BABIES!!), we are expanding that view a little more. Now we are looking for a home that we can settle into for more than 10 years. We don't like moving and have done that far too much in the past few years. I think in the past five years we have moved a total of seven times. From about June 2020 to January 2021 we moved five times and helped our grandmother move as well. We are TIRED of moving and want to be settled!!

For us, we want our home to have the following: a work area for projects, a library and a room dedicated to the cats. We love and adore them immensely! We want them to have a play area to run around and explore to keep them mentally and physically healthy/happy. Their personalities shine and grow the more you have challenges for them which we hope to expand. Definitely need a large work area. One that can house some large tools (lathe, milling machine, 3D printer etc) so that may just be in the garage or a shed type area. We both have overlapping interests and hobbies so there will need to be a small separate area for both of us. John tends to like more electronic type hobbies and I prefer painting or smaller crafty type projects that require a somewhat cleaner surface. Lastly, we want a library to collect books. We love reference books, childhood memory books, science, history, weird facts and more. Whatever touches our interest (and is written well), we would love to add to our collection. Since we have had to move quite a bit, many of our books that we were trying to save for this time have been lost or given away. Still hoping we will be able to replace them.

If your house was on fire....what would you grab? What would you HAVE to have when fleeing? Though there are possessions I would greatly want to keep, my family (My husband and our cats) are what makes any place home. <3