Beautifully written. It's definitely a love/hate situation. Always makes me a little sad the first night in a new place, all the while excited at the possibilities..Full of ideas and plans, but how much time will pass before it feels like home?

We've been in our home for nearly 20 years now, but I do remember those thoughts and feelings when we first moved here. It seemed especially hard to adjust since everyone in the community were strangers to us. We did adjust, and our house soon became a home.

This actually is just what happened to my husband and I about 2 weeks ago. I had lived in another house that I had basically gutted and rehabbed and I knew every square inch of it. Moving into our new house I had panics about if the water heater was supposed to sound like that, what DOES this light switch do? and where do I put everything. In the last house everything had a home, now all my possessions are relocating at the same time! I will say that it has been about two weeks, and while there are still some mysteries, we now feel totally at home in our new place. Try setting up just one room exactly the way you want it and that can be your sanctuary while the rest of the house is chaos.

I just bought a house, too! I have mystery light switches, and I realized that a very bright light shines directly into the master bedroom all night long. Finding out what rooms get hot, which stay the coolest all day, which have direct sunlight at what times of the day, how to evenly distribute the central air, etc. I find it exciting, time consuming, and annoying all at once.

I purchased a mild fixer-upper, and I am a first-time homebuyer. When an exterior light fixture stopped working, I realized that I can't just call the landlord but have to troubleshoot the issue myself!

Oddly, I feel a few pangs of sadness leaving behind my tiny old rental on a busy street in a lower-middle-class neighborhood. I was there ten years, and now I live in a beautiful, much newer house next to a field in an upper-middle class neighborhood.

I just moved into a home my husband and I built in rural South Carolina. My husband died when the house was about half-way completed, so I moved in alone.

For me the oddest thing was the darkness. There are no lights on the 29 acre property unless I turn them on. There are no lights on my 600 foot drive, nor on the county road. And there's much less light pollution in my part of SC than in the major metropolitan areas I'd lived in before, Houston and Los Angeles.

So when I turned off the lights the first night -- darkness, pitch black, enveloping darkness. Of course, once my eyes adjusted it was a LITTLE better, but I realized I needed a night light in case I need to get up in the night and don't want to hurt myself! A trip to Lowes in the nearest town remedied that!

Dorothy

Thanks to a small remodel job that turned into a full-on, down-to-the studs gut/rehab, the first night in our home was spent in a makeshift "room" constructed in our living room where we essentially lived for a month while our handyman and his crew worked to finish the bedrooms.

Needless to say, I've had a "love, hate, REALLY hate, hate, sorta liked, and love" relationship with our home.

In August, we'll be celebrating our fourth year of homeownership and despite those utterly depressing Zillow property value e-mails, I can honestly say I love our home.

The "hate/hate relationship" I have with our landscaping, though, is another story...

I'm normally too tired from moving the first night to realize those sorts of things! It's normally the first day, particularly waking up in a new space, that is the most unsettling.

My husband and I also just recently bought our first home. That first night was terrible. We were sleeping on our mattress on the floor since we hadn't finished painting our bedroom yet. It was dark. Really dark. Dorthy is right about that darkness! We had moved from an apartment in the city to a house in the 'burbs. The quietness was creepy and every sound the house or nature made made me think someone was in the house. For the first month we would play the "what was that noise?" game. So unfamiliar with our surroundings and stunned that the noisy city had somehow become quiet and the quiet country was so ear splitting-ly loud! It still doesn't feel like home 2 months in, but it's getting there.

We just moved into a rental townhouse a month ago. When I first saw it, I loved it immediately, but now that we've been in it for a month, we're seeing just how much the landlord neglected the space while the previous tenant was there.

We have a lot of work to do just to get it back to maintaining, and while that should probably fall on the shoulders of the landlord, I want to do it the way I want, it's exciting! :)

Laura
http://www.justalittlebit.net

My husband and I work in Basel Switzerland and recently moved to rural France just over the border. We bought an old farm house in December of last year. In my gut I had questions about it. But, since living in France was the realization of a lifelong dream, I just went with it. On our first night I smelled something strange. It became stronger and stronger as the night went on, until I was waking up coughing with stinging eyes. The odor was emanating from the heating fuel tanks in the basement. In France they are made of plastic and for some reason our house was old enough that the fumes seeped up through the floors. The next morning I couldn't stop the tears. What had we done? Why hadn't we seen that before we bought?

I met my next door neighbor later that morning when I took the dog out for a walk. She's in her 80s and was born and raised in our little village. The first thing she asked me - even before introducing herself - was if I knew about "the problem with the oil"... Thank you to our agent for failing to mention it...

Like modtramp I have a love/hate, hate/hate, HATE, HATE, like, love relationship with the house. Paid too much, and only really saw the amount of work it needed when it was too late. So now we keep our heads down and move forward trying to make our house a home. Bit by bit.

I just moved into a big, old turn of the century victorian style home with my roommate. It took me about two weeks to get everything unpacked, painted, and figured out, but now I love it! I have even started to re-landscape the yard, since the previous tenants let lots of nasty weeds overgrow. As a former homeowner who remodeled an entire home from the same era, I have a feeling we're going to leave this house a lot nicer than we found it!

Beautiful writing.
I remeber those conversations even a month or so after moving..."where's xyz?" "I know where it is in the other house, but..." I'd say it takes 3 months to feel more like home.

I really am offended by illegal usage of images on these AT sites.

wonderful writing.....just wow...

My husband and I moved into our first house a little over a year ago. We'd spent the first two weeks of homeownership working non-stop on the house into the wee hours of the morning, tearing down wallpaper and painting, and in some cases putting up new drywall... and my father-in-law helped us almost completely gut and remodel our bathroom. So we'd gotten to know our house quite pretty well before we actually spent the night there.

Even so, the bedroom door was on the opposite side of the room than it was in our old apartment, and that took me awhile to get used to. More than a few times I nearly stumbled into a wall when I woke up in the middle of the night to use the bathroom. It literally took months for me to get used to the different location of the bedroom door, but apart from that it started to feel like home pretty quickly!

I'm moving into my first "real" place - bought a loft downtown. I'm a little nervous, getting used to the changes that it will bring.

The stories in these comments are as great as the post!

What was weird for me with my last move was the distinctly different (worse) experience of moving into a brand new house vs. someplace that had been lived in before. The energy was really weird and rather unsettling for a long time.
We had spent so much time here actually building and working and suffering that I think it was hard to change gears into thinking about it as a "home" rather than a project (the drywall dust and unfinishedness of it all certainly didn't help), but I think that homes absorb the energy and imprint of the people who live there, too, and a new house has none and that feels weird.

You have captured the feeling beautifully, Regina. But you don't mention the weeping - is it just me, or does everyone else end up in tears sometime during that first night?

During the first week in my new home, I fell down the stairs, bouncing like a cartoon character down each step on my tailbone until I finally got hold off the - thank you, household gods - sturdy handrail. "Okay, the house is trying to kill me," I reasoned.

Eventually the paranoia faded ...

I just went through all of this with my new house, and on top of that I have all these keys and no idea which locks they're for, despite lots of trial and error.

Great post and comments - so true!

In Germany we say, what you're dreaming at the first night in a new home that will become true. BUT - I was always so tired after my moves, I never ever remembered any of those dreams!

Since I may be moving cross-country soon, so this is perfect timing! I hope to see a house tour once you settle in!

An excerpt from our house blog chronicling our first night in our gut-renovated house last November:

Last night was our first night in Casa dos Gatos! We felt like we were sleeping under the stars in our new bedroom, with its vaulted ceiling and former attic windows letting in ambient street- and starlight.

Sadie had some trouble settling down to sleep, but that was probably because she doesn’t yet have a bedroom door. We also didn’t have any heat last night, so she wore her warmest flannel pjs and snuggled under three blankets. Not to worry though–Nick got the furnace up and burning this morning...

Overall, the experience of finally being in our new house was somewhat surreal, somewhat disorienting, but mostly…well, magical.

I moved into a house I bought with my fiancé last month. It's hard to fall asleep sometimes knowing how much work there is to be done, how much cleaning and unpacking needs to happen, etc. It's also strange, lying there looking at a foreign ceiling, thinking "So this is it... this is my new home."

The first night I woke up at 3am to go to the bathroom. It was the first time I ever had to walk DOWN a flight of stairs to get to a restroom. Everywhere else I've lived, there's been a restroom on the same level where I sleep. I thought I'd never adjust to it. Now I don't even think twice about it.

It took a couple of weeks to realize that of all the keys we'd inherited, none of them worked on the doorknob lock for the garage. This resulted in us locking ourselves out until we put tape over the lock to remind us. I bought a new knob to install, but I haven't gotten around to it yet.

The best moving advice I ever received was to make sure that the bed is set up before anything else. Have the bed assembled and sheets on it, so when you are exhausted and can't lift another box, you can plop into a cozy, comfortable, familiar place with clean linens. Who cares if it looks like the rest of the bedroom is a disaster? You'll be well rested and ready to start fresh in the morning. I followed this advice when we moved into our new home and was grateful to have a bed all ready to climb into when I resigned.

to echo funstraw's sentiment: i'm glad you swapped out the photo... i love todd's work, but it's high-end gallery stuff (with a book to match)... not blog fodder. (my first reaction was a (not-positive) gasp).

as an editorial entity AT is much too large now to go about this willie-nille... you're no longer "just a blog" (but even if you were, that doesn't make it right). the creative common's license and flickr can be your friend.

I love this post!! And the comments too. I read once that a house isn't a home until you "live in it, work in it, suffer in it, build up memories." I thought of that when, to my surprise and dismay, I cried on our first night in the house we bought just a few months ago.

We had rented an almost-shabby 2-bedroom condo for the 4 years previous. I complained about it regularly. It felt cramped and it was difficult to clean. We brought our son home from the hospital to that condo and then 2 years later brought our daughter home. My kids had never lived anywhere else and my husband and I had lived there longer than we had lived anywhere since we were kids ourselves.

So I was surprised when I found myself crying on our first night in our new house which was twice as big as the condo. I actually missed the condo and felt way too weird sleeping in this new place. It took a few hours to move our furniture in that evening and it was past 10 p.m. before the kids were in bed. My 3-year-old said that he wanted to go home. The kids' bedroom wasn't done being painted and the other bedroom was full of boxes so I told him excitedly, "We get to live here now! And you get to sleep on the couch tonight!" He started crying, which in turn got me going too.

It took probably a week before we all started to feel just a tiny bit at home. It has been 4 months now and things are being put away little by little. We have lots of projects to tackle and we have been slowly checking off the (very long) list. I'm happy to say that I do finally feel at home, I know my husband and kids do too, and I no longer make an absentminded wrong turn when we're driving home (our old condo is just across the street from our house). We love the space and the yard and we are all happy here. It is a blessing to have our own home, or as my husband puts it, the bank's own home which they are letting us live in until our loan is paid off.

Oh! And I echo the sentiment about "relocating" all of your belongings, too. In my old apartment, there was a linen closet in the hallway next to the bathroom, where I could store my sheets and towels and medicines and lotions. Now, in my new home, there is no such cabinet, so I have to reconfigure my brain to decide where these things should now go. There's certainly no room in the teeny bathroom for it! Which kitchen cupboard should the plates go? The oven mitts? The silverware? The baking goods? There is no entry way closet, so how shall I arrange my shoes and jackets? It was by far the most stressful part about moving... and one month later I'm still not done yet.

I moved to a new, larger, and quieter apartment about 18 months ago, after 16 years in the old one, which was in a different city. At first I was so glad when my lovely, helpful friends and family left on Moving Day, as I was so exhausted. But by then, it was getting dark and I thoughtfully had packed my lightbulbs seperately from my lamps -- and my new living room had no overhead light.

I had no cable service yet, my phone line & thus internet weren't working yet (as they were scheduled to be), and I discovered that my cell phone couldn't get a signal in my new place! I felt completely isolated and lonely, except for the cat who was of course cowering in fear herself from the stress of moving. I'll admit to being very weepy.

Finally, I dug through my boxes and managed to hook up my dvd player and replay some episodes of "Firefly" because at least it was some noise and sound.

And I found the lightbulbs the next day.

When we moved into our last condo, it was a move from a big town to a tiny village. What amazed me most was how quiet it was. You could hear your own blood flow. You saw a car, half a mile away, and heard the engine. Amazing.

Now we're about to move back to that big town and I'm a bit afraid of the first night in our new old house. All the strange noises will scare me. My husband and I usually sleep in seperate bedrooms, but that first night, and perhaps some more, I'm not going to sleep alone. No way.

We moved about six months ago, and I just recently told my husband that this feels like home now. Although we are still painting, haven't hung most of our pictures yet and there are unpacked boxes in the basement. I think it will feel even more like home once we get those things done.

Our new house is two miles from the old one, and it took me a while to figure out new routes to places we go. I don't know how many times I started driving toward the old house in the early weeks.

I love the new house feeling though. Our house is older, and we're still discovering little oddities (a bible on top of the cupboards in the garage, a Cruella Deville keychain in a desk drawer, the handle on the upstairs bathroom toilet drips eleven times when you flush it), and some things that need to be replaced or repaired. After six months, most of the new house feeling is gone, but I actually kind of miss it.

We had our house built for us, so we planned it in excruciating detail. No surprise light switches or other "unfamiliar" aspects, apart from the mistake in wiring the phones that had us going for a bit...

My first night, however, was kind of odd. I don't think we had technically even closed, yet, but we had arrangements with the builders to permit furniture deliveries at the very end so we didn't have to store them or live without them after closing. (Bargains come when they come, you know!) So we expected a delivery very early one morning, and since my new bed was already there, I stayed alone, no partner, not pets, no working phone (except the cell), none of my main belongings... It was kind of like visiting someone who wasn't home. Just a bit eerie.

(Then there was all the "wow, this house is MINE???" wonderment, too!)

all of these comments are making me nervous! I am moving into my first house at the end of next week. luckily, I will have about a week to move some things over and to get my 14 month old daughter's room ready before the big move next friday.

I am mainly nervous that my daughter won't like the new house--it is about twice the size as our apartment and she'll have so much more space to toddle around and a yard of her very own... hopefully she'll like it?

lcg - It will help to get her room ready ahead of time, but it really just depends on the child. We have three kids, and not one of them had any problems with the move. I asked them a couple of times if they missed our old house, and they were sort of like "what old house?". Your daughter is probably young enough that if she does have any issues adjusting, they probably won't last long, but I bet she'll be just fine!

I remember when we built our new home on my husbands family farm. The day finally came to move and I found myself behind the barn crying when I saw the last load of our belongings coming down the road. This was suppose to be a very special time but it was also hard as it was putting some memories to rest but also starting new ones. The new house now is HOME and I am sure you will capture the feeling of being at home soon

When I moved out of a Victorian four-story duplex to a single-floor basement apartment, I was really nervous. We made the move because my husband wanted to walk to work, but I was upset because to me, stairs mean home, and if you don't have stairs, it's not a "real" home. But something that helped is me going over there a few days before the real move and getting the kitchen organized. We decided that the first night required a full kitchen (though I understand for most people, it's the bed!), and those hours being completely alone unpacking dishes helped me acclimate.

I find that *other* people stress me out when moves happen. Doing that bit all by myself let me get to know the atmosphere of the place without friends and family freaking out around me. When everyone else arrived and got chaotic, I still felt very zen.

We moved from San Diego into an apartment in Seattle that we found on Craigslist and didn't actually see until we moved in. It was odd trying to reconcile the pictures we had seen with the actual way it was laid out.

The first night I woke up to a series of screeches and BOOOMs and thought we were under attack. It turned out we were right next to a train yard.

Having just moved again to the suburbs, hearing nothing at night but frogs and crickets was almost unsettling at first!

I know this going to sound strange but the thing that worries me the most about moving to a new place is being able to find my way home. I commute by foot and public transportation, and this does not take a large degree of concentration (as opposed to say driving would) and I will often find my mind drifting while walking or on the bus. I worry that in my less than totally conscious state I will end up at my last place of residents and not at my current residents. This worry is exacerbated when joining friends for an evening out on the town, a few cocktails and things could even dicey(er).

I worked as a travel nurse for 4 years and had that first night every 3 months. So did my cats. I totally relate to that confusion over which side the light switch is on. Also, there's: "what's that noise?" feeling for the first week or so.
"Which closet did I put the (fill in the blank) in?"
"How does this stove work?"
"which way do these windows face?" (followed by cussing the fact that A) you have east facing windows in the bedroom, or B) the kitchen windows are southwest)

I'm glad to have settled into the perfect apt, which has 15 windows, btw.