Fiancé (32M) bought a fixer upper house, I (33F) find myself literally hating it after a week of renovation and wondering if we are compatible.

I can feel myself torpedoing my relationship as I write, pls help.

I suppose a little back story is needed. When I met my fiancé we were both working in the local big city. He was living a 15 min train ride outside the city while I lived in the city and loved it. I have lived in major cities my whole life, while he grew up in a small town. I moved in with him eventually into his super nice rented apartment outside the city and found myself loving it- a short walk to a vibrant small city artsy community, steps to the local excellent train station etc. eventually fiancé quits stressful consulting job in the city and takes a much less stressful job in another small city maybe 25 min by train from big city. All continues well, we get engaged and decide given our ages that we’re ready for a family.

A few weeks after we find out I’m pregnant he excitedly comes to me and tells me he found a perfect house for us in the small city where he is now working. I’m a little taken aback, I’ve never even thought of a house but am open to the idea. I have a miscarriage which was bad and traumatic in ways I’m still processing, but the house process inexorably continues on. I see the house for the first time 2 days after the D&C and am understandably I guess in kind of a bad mood but I do my best. On the car ride home I tell my fiancé I have reservations but I can see he is in love with the place. Also it’s his and his parents’ money- I’m still paying off student loans and not in a position to buy. So I give my go-ahead, which is on me I know.

My reservations- first of all it’s in straight up what feels to me small town life. All the neighbors know each other, there’s no real arts community like in our old town, there are stores to walk to but it’s along a busy road, I will need to bike or drive (I have no license but my fiancé has a car) to get to the train station. The yard and everything is nice but dear lord I can already see it’s going to be a colossal lot of work that I am absolutely not into at this moment. We just took a full week off work to renovate the ground floor and it was brutal hours of manual labor with umpteen of his friends and family constantly around. I feel more and more distant from my fiancé every day as he’s visibly so excited by how it’s turning out (which I had 100% input into) and I just don’t really care. Every morning as time goes on and we drive to the house in the morning I feel an existential pit of dread in my stomach, and now these last few days I’ve started breaking down in the car. He’s being so patient and understanding and offered to sell the place, but it’s too late for that I know, I need to suck it up and give the place a chance. But I can see years of home renovation like this looming and it’s just killing me. Why couldn’t we have stayed in an apartment?

Right now I’m huddled upstairs listening to him and his dad renovate downstairs and off and on crying all day while waiting for his friends to come over tonight for a construction dinner party and I can barely hold it together. It doesn’t help that we’ve never been alone really this week. I find myself fantasizing about renting an apartment on my own in the local city, even though I was 200% happy with him before this. This is ridiculous I know. Please help me figure out how to handle this, how to talk to fiancé about my fears about living in a small town, how to overcome my complete aversion to home owning?!?

TLDR: reluctantly agreed to moving to a new house and am finding myself hating it before we even move in. How can I overcome this and give it a fair shot?

Submitted August 03, 2019 at 04:25AM by houseregrets https://ift.tt/2YHyiu8