When my husband and I were first married, we rented a run-down place that didn’t cost much. It certainly wasn’t a dream home.

Honestly, I was less than thrilled about renting in the first place. I expected that we would buy a house when we got married. That’s what my parents did. That’s what many people I went to high school with were doing.

But my husband and I were 21 and 22 when we got married, fresh out of college. We were still waiting for my husband to land his first teaching job, so we weren’t financially ready to own a home, nor did we know where he would be working, so putting down roots somewhere didn’t seem like the best option.

We lived in that run-down apartment for three and a half years. Honestly, it was longer than I expected. I thought we would be there a year until we settled into this role of adulthood.

But in all that time, I barely hung any decorations on the walls. In my mind, that place was extremely temporary, and I didn’t want to go through the hassle of hanging pictures just to pack them up and move on. But looking back, I wish I had embraced that first apartment more than I did. I wish I had allowed myself to make it our home, not just where we lived.

Read the entire article at Her View From Home.