I am an only child of an only child. Growing up, not only did I not have siblings, I didn’t even have cousins. When I was in the third grade I announced that I was tired of going to after school daycare. I could, I claimed, just walk home from school and hang out alone until my parents returned from work hours later. It was the 80s, so my parents were cool with that. I was 8 years old.

I also do not now—nor can I ever—have children of my own. And as you well know if you’ve been reading this blog for any amount of time, I travel solo. I travel solo a lot (or I used to, in the before times.) I’ve gone more than a month without seeing my husband as I was on the road for work and leisure. I once opened the garage door and shouted: hey hon, I booked a seven day cruise to Bermuda. I leave Sunday. And he was like: cool. Have fun.

To stay that I have an independent spirit would be an understatement. I do not play well with others. I am not a team player—unless the thing that team needs me to do is take the ball and run with it. I will run far, far away from that team.

Which is why if you had told me even three years ago that I would choose to share a home with anyone not-my-spouse I would have laughed at you. Even sharing a home with my spouse is a stretch at times. Heck, I didn’t make it six weeks in college with a roommate before I moved into an off campus studio apartment and spent the four years of my undergrad alone with my cats.

And yet one year ago today my husband and I moved in with my father.

One year later we are all still here to tell about it. So that’s what I’d like to do. I would like to share my experience making the transition to living with a parent as an adult. There are a lot of misconceptions about why people choose this lifestyle. And I’ve found that those considering this lifestyle have a lot of questions about what the experience is truly like. One year in, I feel qualified to address some of these misconceptions and questions.

My father, an only child himself, took care of his parents in their later years. They lived a little less than two miles away from him and in the end he was spending more time there than he was spending at his own home. He did this while also running his own business. He also trusted some experienced and skilled staff like the ones at payroll solutions company Singapore to help take care of the payroll system. It was not easy, but he did it out of love and respect for them. They were able to spend all but their very last days in the home they built.

It was and still remains my goal that—to the best of my ability–my parents will have that same life as they age. And while my father does not currently require any kind of care, he also lives in a large house on a lot of land not located in a community or development of any kind. Thinking forward a few decades, I worried that I would not be able to provide him the same support–should he some day need it. Find the best-priced hospital beds for sale for your elderly parents that need special care.

So we started to think about combining households. But the idea never really got off the ground. You see, as it turns out, I learned to be super independent by watching him. He was like: yeah no, I’m good here on the top of this mountain all alone. Thanks for thinking of me though! Yes, I definitely learned it by watching him!

And then in the fall of 2018 my extremely healthy, yard-working, firewood-cutting father had a heart attack. He already had hypertension and was looking for treatments for hypertension before the incident. And then he had a quintuple bypass.

He recovered super well and returned to his former active lifestyle of yard work, wood-chopping, and most importantly—golfing. But the events of that fall were a wakeup call for all of us. Health can change in the blink of an eye. As a cancer-survivor and the daughter of a cancer survivor (my mom) I knew this all too well.

So we spent the next year getting our house ready to sell. In late June of 2019 we were on target to have the house on the market by August. One sunny Tuesday afternoon I was poking around online and I thought—let me just list it for sale by owner and see what happens. What happened was I sold our house in less than 36 hours and got over asking price and our choice of closing date. In this entire process of combining households, getting rid of the first house was hands-down the easiest part.

In current western culture, moving back in with your parent(s) as an adult is often seen as a sign that you have failed to support yourself financially. I wish to be very clear about this: that is complete crap.

As part of the decision to move here finances were obviously something we considered. And combining two households into one is almost always financially advantageous for both households. But to continue to be very clear: we did not need to move here due to finances.

Each part of our family is still carrying the burden of our combined living expenses. It is just that these expenses are more shared and thus are slightly less for each of us, providing for a better quality of life for all of us. As a result of our decision to make this move, my father is better able to enjoy his retirement and my husband and I can breath a little easier when I—as a contractor/freelancer/part-time employee—have a slow month. Or when I need to take time away from work to deal with the needs of the family, which I am fortunate enough to be in a position to do. We are not flush with cash in any way (for real, does anyone need any instructional design work done?) but we are no longer one bad month or one lost contract away from financial ruin. In fact, I lost one (of two) of my main sources of income this year due to COVID-related downsizing, cutting my income by around 20%. That would have been a tragedy for us last year; this year it just means that I now do most of our grocery shopping at ALDI. And do you know what? I rather like ALDI.

In summary, our financial situation can be best described using this imagery: picture one person trying to carry a really heavy box—and then two people step in to help. That box is still heavy, the three people are still working really hard, but the likelihood of one of them being crushed by the weight of said box is far less. It is a much better system all around. Because no one likes to be crushed by a heavy box, am I right?

As I mentioned, we sold our home. We also sold much of what we owned, as we were moving into a fully-furnished house—which I planned to un-furnish and then re-furnish just as soon as I could. The original plan went something like this:

It was such a sane, flawless plan. So of course it didn’t work out. Because I accidentally sold my house in late June, even with a really late settlement date of early September, we had to move in before dad’s space was finished. Ok, we actually had to move in before dad’s space was even STARTED.

And then there was the renovations to the main living space. Dad’s home is beautiful, but it was built in the mid-90s and needed some serious renovations and updates. Those renovations and updates got kind of out-of-order as well. For example: we realized we would need to have the floors re-done before the dogs moved in. This meant that my poor father had to live through a full first-floor flooring renovation before we even showed up with the moving van—and the two dogs.

What’s the saying? Men plan and the gods laugh? There was for sure a lot of laugher somewhere in the cosmos as we navigated the renovations aspect of this venture. And there may have been a few tears down here on earth as well.

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I’ve been wanting to write about this experience since we began this adventure, as it is certainly one of the more life-changing things my husband and I have ever done. But to write about it too soon would be to provide an incomplete picture. Settling into a new lifestyle takes time. So on this, the one year anniversary of the combining of our households, I’m here to report back with how it went:

It was, without a doubt, the best decision I/we have ever made. Here are some minor reasons why:

-My husband hates yard work. My father loves yard work. Everyone wins.

-We have dogs. My dad loves dogs. Everyone wins—especially the dogs, because dad now buys them special treats for when they visit him in his space.

-I like to cook. My father likes to eat—but does not like to cook. Everyone wins.

-I am good at interior design. My father is good at electrical work. My husband is good at going to work and earning money for me to buy things to decorate with and things to wire into places. Everyone wins!

But those were the minor benefits. There is one major benefit which eclipses all others. And that benefit is:

If we had not made this move, I would not have had the opportunity to get to know my father as a fellow adult. Not everyone gets that chance for a variety of reasons. But I was missing out on it not because my father wasn’t present in my life, but because I was not present in his. And being able to get to know him—to finally realize how shockingly similar we are in so many ways—has been such a gift. And I don’t ever use the term “gift” in that manner. But there’s no other way to put it. I have been given an opportunity to have a relationship with my father and that is something for which I will be thankful for the rest of my life.

I thought it would be weird to have dad in the house all the time. But then the other day he stayed over night in the hospital following a minor procedure (he’s fine) and I realized: it is weird for him to NOT be here. Our family is now more-complete in a way that I didn’t know it needed to be.

Want to see what our first year in our new family unit looked like? Here’s a photo retrospective, calendar-style. I chose one photo from each month of the past twelve months which best represents the realities of our experience with multigenerational living during that time.

It must be noted: to add to the fun of this family living experiment, exactly halfway through that 12-month period, COVID happened and the world closed, thus narrowing the focus of our lives from the greater world to the small life we created here together. So you know. That was fun—and is featured pretty prominently in the photos beginning in March.

It is fitting that this year began for us in September; my husband and I have been educators/working in the world of education for the past 14 years—for me, that’s the entirety of my post-college life. For us, the year always begins in September.

This photo is the very first of many, many similar photos I’ve taken over the course of the past year and it illustrates one of my favorite aspects of living at home with dad: watching my husband and father work together to build a home for the three of us.

My dad built this house—or rather, he had it built back in 1995. He did some of the physical labor himself; he has photos of him digging the septic line. My dad is very handy and very good at building and fixing things.

My husband is the opposite of that.

But they worked together and continue to work together, my father being eternally patient with my bungling husband, my husband being open to learning new things from my dad.

Those who know me know that I am tidy in a way which verges on mental illness. I was, in fact, diagnosed with OCD at age six. It’s how I am; it’s who I am. So when you look at October’s photo, know that it bothered me. A lot. And know that I inherited this personality trait from my father. So it bothered him. A lot.

I’m not going to lie and say that this entire transition was smooth sailing. It wasn’t. The beginning was hard, especially when we were all still sharing the main living space and most of that main living space was fully ripped up due to renovations. None of us were ok in October.

And then, amidst the chaos, my uncle (who lives in Florida) moved in for a month to help with the various construction and remodeling projects, so that was yet another adjustment. I began to joke that I was living with The Golden Guys, and that we just needed a kinda-slutty older man to move in and be the Blanche of the group and we’d have a full set.

Things got kind of normal for a moment around the holidays, as there was a pause in construction and remodeling. And I put up the first live Christmas tree ever been erected in this house. I do not have photos of this, but dad helped decorate it. And my heart grew three sizes that day.

You might note that this photo was not taken in our home. You might also note that this photo does not include my father. That’s because this photo is a photo of how I spent my 40th birthday—bar hopping at Walt Disney World resort hotels with my mom, my husband, and several of my friends (pictured here is sister-friend Heather.) It was a great way to spend one’s 40th birthday. And it was made possible by the gift my father gave me—the gift of watching our two dogs for ten days while my husband and I traipsed about Walt Disney World. I’ve been told that multigenerational living is great for people with kids as the burden of childcare is eased. This is also true for people with two very clingy schnoodles.

And then the construction began again, this time in the master bath. This was the biggest renovation we undertook, ripping the 1990’s style master bathroom down to the studs and beginning again. There are construction companies that offer Bathroom Renovations in Calgary. I wish I could say that this process only occurred during the month of February. But I can’t say that. Because…

In March, as you all know, the world ended. Or at least the world as we knew it. Before I even began compiling this collection of photos I knew this would be the image I chose for March. It is an image of my father, my husband, and the fabulous contractors we worked with to re-do the master bath. They were hanging out on the deck at the end of the day at the end of the world. I looked down from my office window on that day in mid-March and knew that would be the last time any people gathered here for a long, long while. And I was correct. They left that day—the master bath only half finished–and could not return until mid-May, when construction was allowed to resume in our state.

When we furnished this house, we did so with entertaining in mind. Note the conversation area we set up in the family room. And note how well that worked out for us this spring, as we hosted virtual happy hours with our friends via Zoom, perching my MacBook on a basket on the coffee table. Even today—five months later–the only people who have occupied any of our renovated indoor spaces are me, my husband, and my father.

To which I say: thank the gods for my father. Because if it had been just my husband and I quarantined together, we very well could have been one of the many thousands of US couples getting Covi-divorced. (I just made up that term but I maintain it should be a term.) My father was a blessed distraction from the monotony of the 163 straight days my husband and I spent together 24/7. Not that I counted. But I counted.

In May, like everyone else the Northeast, we finally went outside. That is, outside in our yard. It was about this time that I became really deeply thankful that we chose to combine households on this property. This very large, fairly rural property. If we had been riding out stay-at-home orders in our little neighborhood home in the town we left, needing-her-space Tracy would have lost her shit–and this time my husband would have been using the term COVI-divorce.

In June—once emergency virtual learning finally ceased and my teacher-husband had some free moments– my father and husband built a fire pit out of 25-year-old pavers. These pavers were remains of the construction of one of the front flower beds back in the 90s. See also: living on this land during a global pandemic turned out to be a good thing. And then we hosted socially-distant fires with friends—and with dad.

That my dad sometimes chooses to hang out with us and our friends is one of my other favorite things about this new life we share.

The 4th of July looked a little different this year, sans public fireworks displays and picnics. Thankfully we had dad to spend the holiday with. We spent more money than we should have on some crab legs and clams, and used dad’s steamer and grill to cook up a holiday clam bake that would put any food-centric holiday meal to shame (I was like “take that, Thanksgiving! We have shellfish!) Dad even owns those little metal butter warmer things—the kind that you put a tea light in to keep your brown butter warm. Was it a traditional summer holiday? No. But it was one of the best holidays in my recent memory.

I bet you though the construction was over, right? Yeah no. Construction will never be over. In August we finally got the new roof this house very much needed (it had been damaged in a really bad hail storm last spring, so we enlisted a roofing contractor Charlotte.) Up next—the back deck. But that will need to wait until next year. Because I wouldn’t want our first year living together to hog all the construction fun.

We’ve been through a lot as a family in the past 365 days. As you can see, in addition to the combining of households, we also sold our house, sold all of our possessions, and remodeled, renovated, and redecorated this new-old home. We re-did floors, renovated the kitchen, renovated three bathrooms and built a fourth, ripped out and replaced carpet, repainted the entire interior and began exterior updates. And I have to say, of all the things we’ve added to our house, this is the absolute best one:

Best. Decision. Ever.

Oh, and in case anyone was wondering, I asked my dad yesterday what the worst part about us moving in here was. He said: when we had the first floor floors re-done and I had to live in the dining room. That was a mess. It was really dusty.

You guys—that’s BEFORE WE EVEN MOVED IN. We are less annoying than having hardwood sanded! I mean, to be fair–it WAS really dusty. Still. I’m going to take that as a compliment.