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"Last August, I packed up my single girl life, literally and metaphorically. I bought a house with my fianc\u00E9 and his two sons, gathered up my furious cat and the years of memories stuck in corners of my first house, the single girl house I bought when I was 30 with the idea that I&amp;#039;d only be in it for a couple of years before finding my guy. Nine years later, I was moving out. Simultaneously I packed up my single girl life in another way. That same week I was up against a deadline to finish the book I was writing about the travel adventures I had been having over the previous decade-and-a-half, What I Was Doing While You Were Breeding. So, in perfect cinematic timing, I wasputting away the photos and letters from my single life into boxes as I was putting away the stories and memories from my single life into a memoir. The book will go onto a shelf that I pray my new tween roommates will ignore until college. The photos and letters are in a box in the attic, labeled OPEN UPON MY DEATH. Packing up a home that you made by yourself and moving into one you will make with other people is not an unemotional task. Every single inch of my little 1920s Spanish-style bungalow was decorated by me.  I&amp;#039;m obsessed with tile, so the biggest heartbreak was leaving the Jerusalem stone mosaic on the outdoor fireplace, the herringbone terra-cotta bathroom floors that no one besides me would ever know were made with a rare-sized brick. Who else would ever care? Who else would shake their head at the beautiful two-person bathtub I bought in an &amp;quot;if-you-build-it-they-will-come&amp;quot; mood, only to sit in it alone for over a year before I found someone who would join me? (A man who would then break up with me in the very same bathtub!)  Who breaks up with a woman surrounded by that much beautiful tile? And who wants to marry a man with such poor judgment anyway? I decided to rent my old house out instead of selling it, just so I could protect that beautiful tile from the imaginary granite-loving monster I worried might tear it all out. Of course, decorating a home with three boys (and a dog) has been an entirely new style challenge. I suddenly noticed that every rug in my home had flowers on it. Every single one. In my mind, I hadn&amp;#039;t decorated with an abundance of pink, just some watermelons and raspberries and salmons\u2026 which my fianc\u00E9 resolutely insisted were all pink. My approach with the new house was to use at least a little blue in every room, which seemed to calm everyone down enough that some yellows and oranges and what I called a &amp;quot;teensy bit of coral&amp;quot; could make their way in. I reupholstered the first piece of nice furniture I ever bought myself, a warm (pinkish) taupe ultra-suede sofa, in navy blue velvet, and somehow that bought me enough street cred to add a couple of poppy pillows.   The kitchen nook I&amp;#039;d designed in my old house, my warm yellow (and pink) room where I would sit alone for breakfast and write for hours next to my cat, was tough to leave. The floors were made of 200-year-old French stones that had previously been insulation in Provencal barn roofs before I brought them to Los Angeles and promptly had them installed wrong-side up. They would have to stay behind, but the table came with me, and got surrounded by a new, blue nook, which now houses boys doing homework, and dinners for four. It&amp;#039;s friendlier, now, and more boisterous. The table would love if everyone would work on their dinner manners.  There was a lot of getting rid of old things that felt too old-lifey, and a lot of repurposing old life items into brand new uses. We bought ourselves a new bed, first thing. My fianc\u00E9 is obsessed with &amp;quot;things that do a thing,&amp;quot; so once he found the bed with the hidden drawer the discussion was over. (It&amp;#039;s possible we bought our new house exclusively because it has a laundry chute.) Meanwhile, my old single girl bed, the bed I bought myself at twenty-seven to replace the bed that my mom bought me at fourteen, now holds the body of a fourteen-year-old boy. My fianc\u00E9 and I are not what anyone would call &amp;quot;young,&amp;quot; and both come from artsy parents, so we have acquired pretty good art collections over the years. I love his taste, but our collections couldn&amp;#039;t be more different in stereotypically gender-specific ways. For example, here is a sculpture I brought home from my travels, alongside one from his:  I have a painting of a woman actually turning the other cheek, nose in a corner (that is covered in flowers), and he has a painting of two Wall Street traders choking each other to death. This feels like a bad example from a gender studies class.  But a wonderful thing happened when we put all of these things in the same room: they balanced each other out. Suddenly I didn&amp;#039;t live in a house full of only art with curves and breasts and fertility goddesses. There was some good male energy in the house now. There was balance. Just as we all are a little bit different in our new space, our things have acquired new meaning post-move. The apartment my fianc\u00E9 was moving out of was one that he had previously shared with his ex-wife. In that old bedroom, their old bedroom, this photo was hanging:  I felt that a man on fire jumping out of a burning car should perhaps be somewhere other than in a bedroom. So now it&amp;#039;s in our kitchen, which, on our rushed mornings at least, feels more suited to a burning car scenario. And above it, for balance and as a reminder, I placed a photo I took on a solo trip to Hawaii of my favorite street sign:  Because, let&amp;#039;s be honest: this whole thing is pretty perilous. But, as I&amp;#039;m reminded by our entryway every night when I walk into my new noisy Victorian that the neighbor kids call &amp;quot;The Cinderella House,&amp;quot; it&amp;#039;s also something else: Kristin Newman lives in Los Angeles with her husband, his two sons, their English dog and her Chinese cat. Her book, What I Was Doing While You Were Breeding, is available for purchase now. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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