Behind the Creation of Our Home Gym (+ a Marriage Win)

One of the main reasons I’m determined to find a way to put our house on wheels and take it with us when we move is because I feel like we live in a one-story home (which we love) but that we get the perks of a second story space-wise thanks to our basement. Upstairs on our main level we have everything we need: three bedrooms, 2.5 bathrooms, laundry, living room, kitchen, and even a little extra space in the form of our sunroom. Not too much to clean, we don’t have to run up and down the stairs constantly, yadda yadda yadda. I like a smaller house!

But I truly love our basement because it has all of the spaces that we totally do not need but that are really convenient to have: Jamie’s home office, a storage room, guest space…

…and a gym.

When we were looking at houses I thought the gym was totally unnecessary, but as you can imagine, it sold Jamie hook, line, and sinker. He had me out with him window shopping for new gym equipment before I was barely able to make a dent in our moving boxes. I wasn’t very encouraging of him investing money in gym equipment because I know that there’s many a 1% chance that we’ll ever have a home with gym space again, so time continued to go by and we continued to put the idea of home gym equipment on the back burner.

Everything changed a month before he deployed last year when we visited some of our best friends in Tennessee. Jamie’s buddy (my best friend’s husband) had given up his garage parking spot to create an in-home gym setup. He and Jamie were able to knock out a 30 minute workout while my girlfriend and I hung out inside playing with our daughters. They popped in every 10 minutes or so to grab water and check on us, and then they’d head back out to the garage to lift some more.

My girlfriend explained how much she loved having gym equipment in their home because it meant that her husband was around so much more. He didn’t have to waste time on the weekends, during holidays, etc. running back and forth to a gym; He was able to slip out to the garage, have 30-45 minutes to do something he loved, and then came right back in wearing his Daddy/husband hat.

Jamie loves to work out. It’s truly his favorite way to recharge, but often he used to skip his workouts altogether because he didn’t want to leave Hadley and I for that much time on his days off. Though I loved having him home, I also knew that he was only staying home for us, and that he’d probably really love to get that workout in.

So making a long story short, Jamie came home from his recent deployment and created himself a little home gym, and it really, totally rocks.

It’s not very attractive and kind of all thrown together, but it’s totally functional for Jamie. We’d love to mirror one wall, get more organizing tools, etc. but as you can imagine, we don’t have much interest in investing in a space that very few people see anyway. 🙂

He’s able to do something that he loves, but he’s also available if I need him at the drop of hat. For example, it’s common that I’m nursing Sadie on the couch and Hadley needs something. Instead of telling her to wait, I just text Jamie and ask him to run up. Two seconds later I hear him flying up the stairs and giving me a hand. He makes sure we’re all set, and then he finishes his work out. He’s really into Crossfit style workouts, so he’s usually only exercising for 30 minutes. No time wasted going back and forth to the gym, talking with friends, hanging around, etc. It’s the best of everybody’s world.

As for what to do with it when we move in 18 months, that’s the golden question. We figure that worst case we’ll just do what our friends do and keep it in the garage because Jamie said that he wouldn’t mind giving up his spot. Or I could keep on with trying to figure out how to haul this house with us. We have some time.

And this is the story of how our secret little far-back basement home gym came to be. This is also the story of how we were lucky enough to find a compromise between Jamie enjoying his personal time/favorite hobby and still keeping the girls and me as his number one priority as often as he can.

Let’s chat!

Wives – Do you or your spouse have a hobby that can occasionally lead to marital rifts? How do you/have you found a compromise?

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Wall color: Valspar’s “Tempered Gray”

(currently 33% off from Dick’s Sporting Goods)