Moving Forward With the Greater Good In Mind

When we left our single family home last year I thought that a brand new high rise condo could suit us perfectly. Somehow I imagined a city skyline view could replace space and a pool could replace walking out the front door and into your own little plot of land in this world. Perhaps I was thinking with my pre-children brain, but hear me loud & clear- I was wrong. Does that make me a bad guy?

Trust me, this is not the first extreme in my life. When I had my first child, I was seduced with square footage and bought a 4000sf home outside city lines. (Gasp! This is before my eco-friendly epiphany.) It had 4 bedrooms, 4 bathrooms, a full bar downstairs, a pool room, a two story turret room, winding staircase, wrap around porch, pool, enormous yard... trellis with peony bushes. I added the white picket fence later, but you see how it went, right? Seduced. I even bought the 2 big SUVS that were destined to live in the garage. (Faint.)

Fast forward past a couple places we've inhabited since then and it's easy to see that we've tried it all. Walk ups, single families, condos, high rises, townhomes- new and old. So where are we destined to spend the next holiday? I soul searched, this time with an eco-consciousness that virtually debilitated me. What could ever meet the Platinum LEED NEEDS of mine? I began to stress.

Then Andy said some thing to me yesterday on an unrelated topic that put things into perspective. He said things didn't need to be absolute. They didn't even need to look a certain way to be true. It was about balance. Hmmmm... if I can incorporate my green lifestyle into our new home, it could be enough. In fact, all of our efforts toward the greater good is enough.

Now I'm not running out and buying any gas-guzzlers anytime soon, in fact I am still trying to get rid of our dusty car, but I am planning a huge jump in space. As a family we crave it right now. Rather than see this as a badge of my wastefulness or indulgence, perhaps I could view it is as a test of my resourcefulness. I started to think of how can I make good decisions in the new home?

For starters I am enlisting the genius of Colori for my paint needs. Next I'll turn to Greenwerks for everything outside the scope of my limited DIY expertise. My mind turns to the organic garden we can build on the 4th level and the new spacious home for our worms. This next step starts to feel natural in a way and my anxiety of what I've done turns to excitement about what will be.