In the middle of a street, a quiet street you’ll find a small white and green painted trim house.  In the front yard you will find two tall trees that are almost as old as the house itself. They stand tall welcoming you with open arms. In between the two trees there is a paved walkway that leads to the porch, front door. That’s right, you have found yourself standing at our front porch. Now you wonder how on earth did you get here. This is an ordinary house, like any other in the neighborhood.  You have walked down the street and you have looked at all the houses. Houses with roses on the garden, houses with mowed lawn, houses with swings dangling on its trees, new painted houses, old houses with chipped paint and all sorts of houses. Somehow though you are standing right in front of this particular one and you are wondering how or why? That is my friend because I have brought you here.

When we bought this house it looked nothing like it does today. It had been in the market for some time, it certainly wasn’t begging for a new owner. It is one of those special houses you have to love no matter how flawed or dilapidated it is. No one saw its potential, when people looked at it, sure it looked nice on the outside, the lawn needed to be mowed and the trees needed trimming. The moment they opened the front door, however, they would frown and shake their heads in disbelief. The house was at its worse, it wore stains on its walls, smudged floors and dusty windows. And there was the terrible mold stench. On the backyard there were weeds everywhere and bamboo trees had invaded it. The forlorn old fig tree stood there helplessly bearing a lot of figs. It was summer, it was sweltering hot and all anyone could do is stand back and walk away.

We were living in this same street. We had been wanting to buy a house for so long but we had a hard time finding the right one. We had gone to different cities, we toured dozens of houses but we were looking too hard it was hard to see that what we had been looking for, for so long was standing right in front of us. It was mom and dad who discovered it. It was them who saw the beauty of this house, they neglected its defects and saw something that everyone else had overlooked. Although it took some convincing for us to accept it because no matter how much we tried it just wasn’t easy for us to see their vision, it required a lot of imagination and inspiration to believe that there was actually a way to bring that distressed house  to life again.

But they believed and here we are. After a lot a lot of restless hard working days, we can finally take a breath and take a step back, not to walk away from it but to admire it. So this is what mom and dad saw, this is the reason they believed. This taught us a valuable lesson, don’t be deceived on what you see at first sight, take a closer look and you might just have found what you had been looking for, you just got to believe.