Last year Kathy and I celebrated our 20th wedding anniversary.

This year, we’re celebrating 20 years in our home.

I keep trying to wrap my brain around the significance of this and I keep thinking of different aspects of the 20 years that are worth calling out.

First and foremost, other than the house I grew up in, this is by far the longest I’ve lived in one place. (It even outpaces the house my parents still live in. Depending on whether you count my college years I lived there somewhere between 10 and 15 years.)

Before we bought this house it was 1, 2, or 3 years moving from place to place in Boston, Brighton, and Watertown, Massachusetts.

It also means I’ve lived in Framingham for 20 years, which has been pretty great. I like Framingham. I’ll write more about that later in the year, I suspect - the city is celebrating an anniversary this year - but suffice it to say, we chose well when we decided to settle in Framingham.

There’s a weird part of this, though, where I still feel like I’m living in someone else’s house. I don’t know how to shake that feeling.

We’ve certainly done plenty over the years to make the house our own…there’s just something about me, I guess, where I feel like I’m in someone else’s space.

It’s kind of like that feeling in the back of my head where even though I’m pushing 47 years old here, I still feel like a clueless 20-year-old.

And that’s kind of appropriate to this situation, because we were clueless homeowners when we first moved in here. We were the youngsters of the neighborhood…and now…well, we’re the veterans, to put it mildly.

It’s nice to see young people move in and see little kids grow up and hopefully we’ll see those same people for years to come.

As you can see from the pictures above and below, we’ve done lots of work on the house - we re-sided it, which was a must because some of the wood siding was rotting and if we hadn’t replaced it we’d probably have a transparent house because the wood would have rotted away in spots.

That front entranceway railing replacement is something I like very much - I’ve re-stained the wooden railings there in that white weatherproof coating twice now - it’s about once every five years I need to do it. My goal is to make sure it never gets in as rough shape as it was in when we needed to replace it.

The back deck was replaced too. We have a nice backyard - I think that’s the thing I’m most proud of. After we replaced the deck (also felt like it would rot away), and got rid of the useless hot tub and the surrounding structure and tore down the existing shed (I since bought a new one), we had a lot more space that I’ve set up in different ways in the past few years but it’s been a nice place to be in the warmer months and I feel good about making it a space that the girls have been able to enjoy with friends and that we can enjoy as a family.

There is plumbing work that needs to be done. There is probably electrical work that needs to be done. Maybe we’ll re-do the roof and maybe we’ll add solar panels.

We’ll probably need to do some kind of kitchen renovation at some point and I’ll certainly be telling you this year about some painting I’ll be doing…but I guess this is all the stuff that happens when you live somewhere for 20 years.

And slowly but surely eventually you make it feel like your own.