My husband and I bought our home, but if I had to do it all over again I'd choose to rent instead

I have a junk problem. I am not good at letting go of things.

When you own a home, you can just put it in the basement. If I had been moving all this time, I suspect I would have been pressured to ditch some of my clutter. Maybe I am just giving myself an excuse, but at this point, I have no idea what is down there.

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Like many people, I own a home that was built during the boom years, when they were slapping together new developments everywhere.

In the 1980s, when our townhouse was built, they were building with cardboard, masking tape, spit and a bit of poorly poured concrete. They were building big — we have two huge bedrooms and three spacious bathrooms. The rooms are oddly shaped, and it is hard to use the space well. The house is drafty, poorly insulated, and the heating and cooling bills are really high.

The basic bones of these cookie-cutter homes are uninspiring. It is the compromise between location and style that my husband and I could agree on. It has little character, and no amount of interesting paint colors or new flooring will change that. It is what it is. Fairly comfortable, but why settle? I dream of a home I could really love, and this is not that home.

This is not to say that I am not thankful for the stability and comfort that owning a home has been in my life.

But in this uncertain world, you can lose your home with just a few months of bad luck with health or career. How secure is owning when there are so many foreclosures around us? Maybe there is some basic psychological benefit to remaining in the same house, but there is also the emotional cost of missing out on the adventures that may have been.

These flimsy walls, hard-to-open windows, and bland design features don’t speak to me in the way I wish the idea of home did. Really, home is where you make it, so why get stuck in bland?