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Im in a similar situation. My SO owns a home. A nice one. I dont. We discuss what will happen when the relationship progresses. She says we have this house just move in with me when the time comes. I stay there alot now anyway. Or when her kids are gone.
But it was her and her ex husbands house. ANd the thought of it does worry me a lil. Like it will never be "home" to me. Maybe it will pass over time. Hopefully.
You also have to look at it from the logical point of view. If things progress very well for you two, you (like myself) would love for both of you to get a place together. However, you have to figure out if financially (especially in this economy) if you can do that.
But a rental (which I'm assuming you're doing) versus a home, there's no contest. The home is better (financially of course). You can get some sort of return on the home, but get absolutely nothing back on a rental.
That is what I did, and it made financial sense because what she was paying per month was less than my rental. So two incomes with a lower cost place was the better choice financial wise, but this place will never feel like home to me.
I had a good friend who went through this. He got the house in a divorce (Real nice place). When he remarried a few years later his new wife moved in. It took her a few years to get comfortable in "His" house but he let her know it was her place now to. Over the years she did some redecorating and a little remodelling to put her own stamp on it and has been ok with the arrangement for a while.
Of course, It does'nt hurt his long tenure in the house means that they have a mortgage and pay property taxes that are 1/2 what it would cost them to buy a similar-sized house today. She's found lots of ways to spend the savings.
It is never "our" place unless our names are on the title.
I will NEVER move in with another man and not have my name on the property ever again. I have risen above the horrendous judgment I had before, so I don't think I'll have much to worry about. But I will never put myself in a position to have to move out of "our" home again.
I will NEVER move in with another man and not have my name on the property ever again. I have risen above the horrendous judgment I had before, so I don't think I'll have much to worry about. But I will never put myself in a position to have to move out of "our" home again.
Weirdly enough I now sort of have the opposite problem.
When my wife and I first met I had my own place and she lived with her parents (allegedly because she was back in school, tho later I learned differently).
I had lived in relative squalor for a long time while getting back on my feet from a bad period. I had also been dating a very demanding woman (the one with the house, curiously enough) who took up a LOT of my time and money. Therefore, despite the fact that I had a nice enough apartment I had very little furniture in it; things were in disarray because there was nowhere to put them.
I was deployed for duty in Iraq for 15 months (twelve on ground, three in various stages of transition to and from) and managed to save up a fairly pretty penny despite spending a LOT on a vacation to Scandinavia.
Returning home with this, I stepped into my apartment for the first time in over a year, a year during which I lived with several other men in a dusty tent, took one look around and said "Oh, no -- this will NOT do!"
Since I wasn't required to return to work or duty for 90 days I opted to rearrange that aspect of my life. I shopped around for furniture, asked questions, learned more about colors than I had before. I spent time exploring my own tastes and finding ways to make them "tasteful".
By the time I finished I had a very nicely furnished, "all grown up" apartment with stuff that didn't look like Wal-Mart and IKEA. Friends who came by were convinced I'd had a woman help me decorate but no, I just like things to be manly-yet-cozy, to look nice but not to require sterile gloves just to touch. I always wanted a place where people think "This looks nice" but feel at home in rather than worrying over spilling crumbs. And I did it.
Enter the woman who became my wife. She often told me about her own nice stuff and her good taste but it was "all in storage due to circumstances". Besides, once we were married and moved into my place (henceforth OUR place) for the time being, it was already crowded and we made plans for a larger apartment while building up to buying a house.
We moved into the next apartment expecting a child and that's where I began to learn about the real differences in our decorating tastes.
If I had to describe my tastes, it would be Mediterranean Viking Royalty with an Asian Splash. I like warm, earthy colors and textures offset with a brilliant splash here and there, earthy lines and angles occasionally juxtaposed with the intricate definition of the human touch, all with an Old World flavor running beneath. As I said, manly, yet cozy.
My wife's taste is very, very distinctly College Dorm Room. She felt very Martha Stewart when she got an olive-beige sofa with canvas pillow backing. She felt very homey when she asked if there was someplace to put a picture of her favorite comic book hero on the wall.
There's no getting around it, her tastes are the same four years later when we have a house. Fortunately (and UN-fortunately) I have to deal with her indecision more than I do her tastes.
When we bought the house I pitched myself into it, wanting this to be OUR place. I always knew I couldn't have everything my way, so I did my best to involve her. Where do you want this? What do you think about that? How should we approach...?
Her answer was always "I don't know. I'll have to think about it for a while."
Meanwhile I was stalling rather than unpacking, but HAD to live so little by little, instead of things being unpacked and arranged, we merely opened boxes and sort of lived out of those. I'd empty a box sometimes and get rid of the cardboard, stick items here and there just to get rid of the bloody boxes-boxes-boxes.
She opened TWO boxes during this time. She unpacked neither fully and on the second one I vowed I'd never touch that box, wait until she actually finished unpacking it herself.
That box, more than two years later, is still gathering dust in one corner of the kitchen.
About two months ago I decided I could no longer live like this. I hate it, I hate the mess my life has become, and she spends large amounts of time away with her parents anyway. So for a month while she was gone and I was -- yes, I'll admit it -- getting rid of a rodent problem which grew up because of this godawful mess since we live out in the country now, I began to make my way through things slowly.
I moved boxes, now genuinely perplexed as to where items should go. The entire place needs revamping and rearranging but it's much harder now with it all packed in than it would have been when we were MOVING in.
Little by little I was, however, accomplishing this, and rooms seemed to be emerging from the corners inward, items slowly piling in the center, to be picked through, determined for location OR thrown away.
It's a slow, slow process. Do I throw this away? Will I need it later when something else falls into place? What IS this thing, and will she need it?
She came home after her time away. And she had two weeks off for the Christmas holidays while I was still working daily.
I came home one evening and the large pile in the living room, the sort of "central pile" was all gone, completely. She proudly declared to me "I cleaned the living room!"
Turns out she worked very diligently moving each pile kind of back where it had been, STILL just a pile, but out of the center of the room, filling all previously-cleaned corners. Whereas I'd been slowly picking and choosing, trying to make decisions, she could merely shove. As for the pile in the living room, which was comprised of bits from various piles in other rooms which I KNEW did not belong in those rooms (but wasn't sure where they belonged), it was all dragged into one room and piled all over the place.
Not clean, but out of her immediate sight, which was good enough for her.
These days I find that I no longer care about making this "our" house, want it to be cleaned and decorated even if the tastes are all MINE, because she doesn't care enough to help take care of more than the kitchen counter since she cooks there. I find that if she starts shoving things around (not decorating or cleaning, just shoving things to get them out of her way) I want to SCREAM!
Yes, the opposite problem.
Not MY house turning into OUR house as I always felt was proper; instead, OUR garbage pile turning into MY house because she's either a total hog OR her taste is completely atrocious and inappropriate.
I've had a lot of problems of this nature, but I won't elaborate on them because I know for a fact the conversation will be dragged in a different direction.
Even though it's not always easy and/or financially feasible, ideally a couple should move to a place that's new to both people!
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