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It’s going to be a long-time before my neighbors start talking about “Mr. Morse’s house.” Back in late June, my fiancee and I closed on our first home. It’s a well-maintained, four-bedroom cape in Riverside. The house was built in the late 1950s and accordingly, it’s rock solid. My neighborhood is a dead end street that’s so quiet I sometimes find it a bit eerie.

Growing up, my grandmother used to constantly talk about the difference between a house and home. My mom’s family moved a lot when she was a kid – Providence, Johnston, Arizona – So I always thought she had a bit of experience to back up the credo.

Today, I’m living the adage as a first-time home owner. We’ve painted a couple walls and moved in our own furniture. There’s a new flat panel TV hanging over the fire place and down the road, there’s plans to to replace the current wood shingle with vinyl siding.

Long before I lived there, however, a man and his family built a life in that home that precedes my birth by more than a decade. The gentleman maintained the house beautifully and on top of its location, its condition was undoubtedly one of the reasons it was off the market before a second open house. In talking with my new neighbors, it seems the gentleman who lived there was quite revered on the street.

My fiancee and I fell in love with the place the moment we walked in. We put in an offer less than an hour after we left. It’s obvious the man who used to own the house loved it as well. One of the first things I noticed when checking out the basement. (As a guy, it’s standard operating procedure to examine the basement before bedrooms, bathrooms or the kitchen.) I found notes scribbled on pieces of wood. Each one denotes a person, a year and how old they were.

They go back quite a-ways. The earliest one I found is dated 1969. I was born in 1984.

I look at these messages every time I descend to the basement for laundry or a run on the treadmill. I love my house and the life I'm building there though I can’t help but know the previous owner probably loved it a little bit more.

It is where his children played. It’s where he and his wife celebrated anniversaries. It’s where he rode out the Blizzard of ‘78.

It’s where he spent decades making a house a home.

So far, I’ve got about six and a half months of memories built into the place. Among the highlights? The last Sunday in August when a handful of family members hunkered down in the living room because mine was the only house that hadn’t lost power to Tropical Storm Irene. The first night I slept there, a restless evening of worry interrupted by the thud of my beautiful fiancee falling off the bed. The sound of my two King Charles Cavalier Spaniels, Cooper and Otis, wrestling in the kitchen. The first Christmas, when we suffered through a few weeks of allergies to have a real tree. The first New Year’s Eve, when we hosted a small group of close friends.

It’s a short list that has come together quickly. Hopefully, I’ll be able to read this a few decades from now and talk about our first night as husband and wife (Sept. 8, 2012), our first child and the day we retired, among other events.

Hopefully, I’ll be able to look at the names scrawled across the basement walls, find a few new ones that make me think of years past and remember those first few months when I started the process of making a house a home.