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We were going to move. We were all ready to move. We’d actually started moving!

Then we decided not to move.

I know, it’s all very confusing. Let’s go back a little bit.

Ever since we sold our house in Detroit and relocated to Connecticut three years ago, we’ve been in transitional digs. We had the movers pack up everything from our two-story colonial and transport it to our temporary quarters, a one-bedroom flat on the first floor of an old church rectory. For the first week of our residence here, we slept on an inflatable mattress and lived out of suitcases while we waited for our furniture to arrive.

We expected only to have to stay in the flat for four or five months, tops. The church that had hired my husband had made promises about housing; it was the deciding reason I’d consented to let him take the position. We didn’t know what they were going to do, exactly, but we knew it was going to be something. So when the movers arrived the next week with our belongings, we decided to do as little unpacking as possible. We filled up the basement of the old rectory with all our boxes—books, CDs, DVDs, decorations, everything the movers had stuffed into cardboard containers, everything I’d packed, everything that had sat in the garage for a year while the house sold. Anything that couldn’t go into the basement, we put into a hired storage unit.

We let the movers move as much into the flat as we could justify stuffing in there. Mostly we let it sit wherever they decided to dump it. A chest ended up next to the front door. One of our sofas—both were beat up and due to be replaced, but we decided not to do anything until we ended up in our permanent quarters—sat by it self in the dining room. From the basement we dug out a couple of lamps so we could see by night, and some dishes and a few pots and pans to cook with, but the happy assumption we made was that within a few months, we’d be somewhere else. Why unpack everything just to pack it up again?

The thing of it was that we lived this way for all three of our years here. We never made any attempt to fill up shelves or organize anything. We rolled our dice that first week and just let them lay. Every month we learned something new about the housing situation. A committee had been formed. The committee was meeting. The committee had decided to do a study. The study resulted in another committee, which was going to renovate one of the church’s properties for us. The committee had to wait for the tenants to move out, then for the bids to come in, and then for the renovations to begin. We grew older and older, the boxes in the basement grew moldier and more rotten, and my sense of restlessness and of being a vagrant grew uneasily greater.

I’ve written about the house finally nearing completion, in recent months. In anticipation of moving, we ordered new furniture to replace the beat-up stuff, and had it delivered to the house. We moved everything from the storage unit into the new place. We started moving boxes from the basement over, too.

Despite our anticipation, we still had one big question unanswered: how much was the new place going to cost us, every month?

It was already a little unsettling that in this area of the country we were paying more to rent a one-bedroom apartment than we had been paying on our mortgage for a three-bedroom home back in Detroit. Admittedly, that was Detroit. This is tony, much sought-after Greenwich. But we wouldn’t be able to figure out exactly how much more we’d have to be allotting for rent in the house until the renovations had been completed, the house assessed, and its official rental value set. Even at the time we started moving, the final number was a total mystery.

A couple of weeks ago we finally found out what the assessed rental had been. Even at the hefty, more-than-half-off discount the church had decided to give us, it was still several hundred dollars more than what we were paying for the apartment. We knew all along we’d have to pay taxes on the difference between the rent we were going to pay and the rent anyone else would have paid; it’s calculated by the government as a taxable benefit. Not until we had those numbers, though, were we able to figure out exactly how much tax that benefit would cost us.

When we toted up the rent, the amount of extra tax we’d have to be paying, and the utilities we don’t pay now but would have to assume there—water, gas, and heat—we came to the sober realization that while we certainly could move to the house and afford it, kind of, we wouldn’t be able to do anything else. Like, ever. And isn’t the big benefit of living in the metropolitan New York City area supposed to be the abundance of things to do?

After a weekend of soul-searching, we decided not to move at all. We’d stay in our flat, at the same percentage discount we’d be getting off the house. Neither one of us wanted to trade experiences for space.

I tell you. I’ve never been so happy about a decision in my life. I didn’t really care one way or the other what we chose. I was just ecstatic that after four long years of waiting, we finally knew where it was going to be.

I guess I’m a nester. I like a comfortable home filled with objects that mean something to me. Home is where I work; it’s where I relax, where I bring my friends when I can. Growing up, I was never able to think or do my homework or play unless my room was in order. I haven’t changed much as an adult. I’ve been the last four years in disarray and I’ve felt every moment of it, personally and professionally. We might have been living here, but I never felt at home.

That’s changed, though. We’ve spent the last two weeks moving into the apartment in a way we should’ve, long back. Instead of storing pots and pans on a metal rack that used to house chemicals and panes of glass from my old studio, that the movers dumped into the kitchen the first day, they’re in new spots in actual reorganized cabinets. The rack has been banished to the basement again and one of our old bookshelves sits in its place, modestly housing the small kitchen appliances. Our old sofas are gone for good, replaced by the new furniture that sat for a month in the house where we might have moved. The dining room now houses bookshelves for the small library I’ve left myself, our piano, a comfortable armchair, a small bar, and the dining room table. It feels more like a space for actual living than it did when it was That Room Where We Kicked Off Our Shoes And Left Our Coats.

Everything’s put away—music, books, DVDs, tablecloths, bed linens, crystal, the good China. Everything has a place, or soon will. The basement is nearly clear. I’ve hung framed photographs and our ceramic art tiles in every room. My glass work has a showcase in the built-in cabinets in our dining room. Even my old board games from my youth found a space in the coat closet—just in case I ever make any acquaintances who want to come over and play Probe or Smess or King Oil or Clue. (But I get to be Miss Scarlet.) I’m very proud of the work we’ve managed to do over the last couple of weeks. The flat has gone from feeling like someplace we slept nights while we sojourned somewhere new—a hotel room in Las Vegas for a week—and more like a real, actual place that I’m proud to call home.

The weeks were not without their casualties, however. The basement is not completely water-tight. While it did weather both Hurricanes Irene and Katrina with only mild puddling, it’s still a hundred-and-fifty-year-old basement that’s barely a step above a glorified fruit cellar. Some stuff did suffer. I lost a large box of shoes to rot and mildew—not really a big loss, since I actually had thought I’d given them away to Goodwill already. One box of Dover clip art books, and collections of Bloom County happened to fall from a stack into a puddle at some point, and the whole thing was so irretrievably ruined that I had to wrap it in plastic so I could pick it up safely to chuck it in the dumpster. I lost a few other paperbacks that had been crushed beyond recognition. I’m afraid to touch my old French horn case, which looks as if it’s been overgrown by a mutant fungus from The X-Files.

Small things, though. They’re sacrifices I gladly make in exchange for feeling like I’m home again.