A Compact House Painting As A Moving Gift

Something big happened last week: my parents sold the house I grew up in.

They’ve been planning to do this for a while, so it is not a shock or anything. It is also not as depressing as it could be since they are selling it so they can move to Richmond (right now they are about 2 hours away in Northern Virginia). My parents are both retired and have been planning to downsize for a while now. They picked Richmond for a bunch of reasons, including that four of their five grandchildren live here. So all in all, we are truly glad about the news.

But there is still something major about the closing of this particular chapter, so allow me to be sentimental for a moment.

My parents moved into this house in 1979 (forgive the not-so-fairly winter pic above). It was a new construction home at the time, so they – along with my two older sisters – were its first (and up until now only) occupants. If you are keeping track that is two years before I arrived, meaning this is the house they brought me (and later my little sister) home to after we were born. So as you can imagine, a lot has happened in this house over the 32 years they have owned it. Including my mom taking annual pictures of us on the porch for first days of school and for our birthdays (note the homemade banner taped to the storm door behind me).

When we heard they accepted a buyer’s contract early last month, we took the first opportunity to gather there one last time for a family portrait. My sister Emily even made an homage to my mom’s birthday sign tradition for us to pose next to. Here is the “original” six The house team (aka, the “Petersix”)…

…and now with our expanded family of spouses and children (can you tell that it was POURING rain during these shots – fortunately my bro-in-law the professional photographer knew how to handle it).

In addition to these pics, my sisters and I hoped to honor this big moment with a gift. After debating a few things, we chose to get them a drawing or painting of the house. They already own a pen and ink sketch of it, so (thanks to some suggestions from you folks on Twitter) we landed on getting a painting of their front door from artist Kal Barteski (she calls her series T+A – compact and excellent). So I sent Kal this pic of the door…

And a couple of weeks (and $100 – split four ways among me and my siblings) later, this arrived. Compact and excellent indeed.

It is in fact 5 x 7″, so it is not that compact. Kal paints them on thin onion skin parchment paper which is why it looks a bit wavy and textured. It threw me off a little at first, but when I read that she does it so your painting looks truly like original art – not a print or a replica – it won me over as quite charming.

The onion skin paper is also translucent so she invites people to mat her paintings on colored or patterned paper to customize them and add even more texture. We had lively trying a few colors & patterns underneath but ended up going the straightforward route and putting it on white card stock since we thought my parents would like it best that way.

We at last presented it to my parents this week and they Enjoyed it. Woo hoo!

Oh, and since some of you might be curious – my parents got quite lucky when it came to selling their house. Before it was officially listed on March 1st, they had a preview showing at the end of February and that person put in an acceptable offer on the spot. Not bad right? Since it happened a bit faster than any of us expected (including them) they have around six weeks until they can officially move into their new house in Richmond. In the meantime they’ll be bouncing around between their Delaware beach house, my sister’s house in Northern Virginia, and my sister’s house here in Richmond. But we cannot wait for the day that they can officially call our city their home.

Psst- The babyproofing adventures continue over on BabyCenter where we are sharing how we anchored a giant wall mirror in our bedroom (thankfully it was not rocket science).