After more than a year living with family, my husband and I are finally moving into a place of our own again. Not just finding a place to live, but creating a home for ourselves.

I know many people have had to move in with family to save money at various times. The recent recession and slow recovery has increased the frequency of multi-generational households, I am sure. It was nice to have a soft place to land and give us time to find the right place. And our dog, Lucy, has loved having the attention of her grandparents.

When my husband’s grandmother was told that we were finally moving out, her response was to ask if we were taking Lucy with us. At least we know someone will be missed, just maybe not us humans.

The moving process has been stressful. I am relatively new to Hampton Roads and Virginia, so figuring out where to or where not to look for places to live was the beginning of many challenges.

I honestly forgot how much there was to set up for a new place. It has been a while since we have had to do that. Do we want cable? What about Internet? And what about water, sewer and electricity?

Trying to find time to take care of all of these things around our work schedules has been challenging.

Throw into the mix that my husband recently joined the Army and all of the forms and other things we had to consider with the military.

My husband asked the other day, “Can we not move again for at least a couple of years?!” Here’s hoping not, or if we do, professional movers are involved. Luckily this time we did have the help of family and didn’t have to move far to our new place.

I have been focused on getting our belongings out of storage, packing our stuff and now unloading all of it into our new place. There are so many things that I have come up with that we need to make this place our own. While some of these things — like a dining room table — are necessities, I think that we have been too focused on all the stuff. We have too much stuff, really.

Now that we are in the middle of unpacking and hanging up pictures, it is just nice to have our own space again to do with what we want. I am ready to settle into our own routine and focus on what is really important — the home, not the house.