We've moved! Not far!

David and I were pretty settled in our uptown rental, half of a double that David called home for 16 years. I myself lived there for eleven, after David and I married. I loved my house, loved my neighborhood, and fully planned on buying the entire property from our landlady after her impending move.
But things change. The move was delayed several times, and meanwhile our needs changed. We realized that we needed a little more room, but not a lot: not the entire double we were living in (our roomy one bedroom was on one side, but the other side was a gigantic five bedroom!). We sort of wished we had more than one bathroom (neither side of the house did). And then when David was biking to work one day, he passed a house getting ready for a broker's open. It was on our very same street, and it was adorable. We went to the broker's open that night, put in an offer the next day, and accepted the counter offer and were under contract the next.

It's funny: our move took us just four blocks from our old home, but we're now on the other side of St. Charles Avenue, which now puts us in the Black Pearl. New Orleans neighborhoods are so small, so exclusionary! I can still walk to the same stores, but now I have to claim Black Pearl, had to buy a parking permit for my car, and - since I'm just the third house from St. Charles - can claim a little of that St. Charles cachet (this is a thing I didn't know about until now!).

Stop being so cute.

The house we bought is a little gem in a row of gems - four identical houses, in fact, known as The Four Sisters. It's a newer home for the area (c.1915), but has so much New Orleans charm. I love the wood floors, the quaint gardens, the vibrant colors, the eleven-foot ceilings, the ornate fireplaces, and the floor-to-ceiling windows.

The move itself was as easy as the buying process. I recruited some awesome friends and their trucks, and we moved our entire household in exactly two hours. Since then, we've enjoyed settling in, although we came to the realization that almost none of our furniture suits (most of it is dwarfed: our old ceilings were 9.5 feet; these are a foot and a half taller, and it's enough to make all of our art too small and our furniture too squat). We've met our neighbors. We've remembered to change our addresses, a surprisingly confusing process (WHY won't people accept that I moved to a new number on the same street?!). I'm comfortable here, and while I do miss my old home, too (it is a grand old charmer with a beauty all its own), I love this one, too. And I'm happy to own just a little piece of this city.