Jerry Kraft's "House Hunting" is built on a single extended metaphor: looking for a home is like looking for a frame. The speaker and a partner (the "we" suggests two people) are searching for the right place, but the poem describes it as choosing a frame for a painting that doesn't exist yet. They already know the canvas size, the colors, the feel of the brushstrokes. They have put in the hours and mixed the paint, even finding shades they never expected.
The turn comes in the fourth stanza, where they admit that walls matter little compared with "the world inside." The house is only a border. What counts is the life the two of them bring to it. Even so, they "begin again," and that phrase gives the poem a quiet, patient tone. The mood is warm and hopeful, with a hint of weariness in the repeated searching. The final image of an "empty space" where imagination "draws life" turns the unfinished house into a promise rather than a lack.