Home is an important concept. As I have found over the past year, it is a particularly important concept to me.

When Dianne and I made the decision to move back to Toronto, we left behind the house we had built in Edmonton in 2006. The house of our dreams, we had expected to live in it for at least 10 years, if not more. By the time the wheels of our relocation were put in motion, we had not yet lived there for five years.

What followed was a frustrating exercise in attempting to sell the house. We loved it. Everyone who visited had loved it. We had received offers to buy it even while we were building it, and knew of several friends that coveted it. How hard could selling our dream home be? Pretty hard, as it turned out.

Combine a challenging economy, a higher-end home and an extremely unique layout, and you have the recipe for a very long sales cycle. We knew someone would eventually fall in love with it, but we certainly didn’t expect it to take as long as it did. Fortunately, 15 months after putting our beloved home on the market, it found a new family to love it. And we were able to finally get on with looking for a new place of our own.

Cue the house hunt.