Hi, I’m Ashley. I’m 35, married to Nick, and mom to our 10-year-old daughter, Alice. We live just outside Columbus, Ohio. I work full time as a middle school librarian, and Nick’s a mechanic. Life’s not glamorous, but we’ve built it piece by piece, and until recently, it was finally starting to feel like everything was falling into place.
The house was our dream. Not a big mansion or anything flashy. Just a cozy, two-story fixer-upper with a good roof, a little garden out back, and the kind of porch you can sit on in the evening with a cup of tea while watching your kid ride her bike. But it wasn’t handed to us.
We saved for almost a decade to get here. I’m talking about skipped birthdays, no-frills holidays, and working extra hours whenever we could. We lived in an apartment where the heater wheezed in the winter and the neighbors fought through paper-thin walls. Every paycheck that didn’t go to bills got tucked away.
“Are you sure you want to sell the canoe?” Nick asked once, holding the paddle like it was a limb he couldn’t believe he was giving up.
“It’s either we keep floating down the river on weekends or we finally have a bathroom that doesn’t leak.”
So, we did it. We sold the canoe, the old vinyls, and the coffee table that Nick’s dad had made years ago. We made sacrifices.
When we finally bought the house, it was in rough shape. The walls were stained with years of nicotine, the floors were scuffed, and the plumbing was outdated. Still, it had good bones, and it was ours. We spent our weekends breathing in sawdust and paint fumes, learning how to plaster from YouTube tutorials, and laying carpet even though neither of us had ever done it before.
We even went through fights.
“I told you Dove White, not Eggshell!”
“Ashley, they’re literally the same color.”
But when it was finally done, we looked around at what we had created with our own hands, and it felt like magic. It was completely and unmistakably ours.
