Back were we started?

Four years of gains in home prices wiped out wasn't what I wanted to read just as we are planning to celebrate our 48th month in The Cool House. My first thought when I read the headline was an earthy Anglo-Saxon epithet, but when I thought about it in greater depth I have to say it could be a lot worse. We bought this house because we loved it, not to be our personal piggy bank. We could have taken the realtor's advice and ripped out the dusty vinyl vertical blinds and put it back on the market and made some easy money, most of which would have gone in her pocket in commission. We could have sold it at the height of the market in late 2005 when everything was selling at hugely inflated prices, but we didn't buy the house to flip it.
We were lucky to buy in 2004. If we'd bought a year later we might not have been able to afford this great house, or we might be sitting on negative equity. We didn't put the house on the market two years ago, take it off again and re-list it earlier this month at $200,000 less as one of our neighbors has done. Neither did we do such a huge amount of work that we can't afford to drop the price (the situation for another neighbor).
This is a wonderful house and we love it and with luck we'll still be here when the market picks up again, by which time we may even have finished all the work that remains to make it truly fabulous again.