What makes your house feel like a home?

The other night I was sitting in the dining room thinking that this house, the one that has driven me crazy and that I've pretty much hated for the last year feels like home.

We were grateful for the friends who let us live in their house for most of the past year, but their house, though we took it over, never felt like home. For many months I was in a state of displacement.

I'd always thought it might be my children that made a house into a home, and they certainly go a long way in creating a lived in feel to a place, but alone they didn't make a place home. Was it the furniture I've had following me around for so long? I don't think so, because when we bought this house, my mother gave me a lot of stuff she didn't want anymore, so much of the furniture is new to me.

Building a home is truly full of many stages and pieces. This place is beginning to feel like home, but the boxes and clutter, the baby sleeping in my closet -- all lend a somewhat temporary air to the place.

What really made this place suddenly become home to me though, despite all that, was the night we unpacked our books. We have a lot of books and we haven't unpacked them all. I also haven't read them all, but taking them out, seeing my old friends and putting everything up on the shelves, made this house less of a stranger. My family lives here and so do our books.