‘NCIS’ Star Sean Murray Shows off House He Spent a Decade Designing

NCIS star Sean Murray, who plays Special Agent Timothy McGee on the long-running CBS series, showed off the Southern California home he shares with his family. Murray, 43, spent 10 years designing the home, as NCIS granted him the job security he needed to lay down roots with his wife and two children. Murray and his wife Carrie, 46, are parents to daughter Caitlyn, 13, and son River, 10. They bought the home when Carrie, who runs the Business Relationship Alliance, was pregnant with River.

Murray put so much time into designing the home because he never really had the opportunity to make a space his during childhood. He is the son of a Navy Captain, so he spent time moving around, living in Singapore, Australia, and London before he turned 8 years old. “I remember my mom and I joking about, ‘Is it going to be a light shade of military green or a dark shade of military green?’” he recalled in a new interview with PEOPLE. His family was not allowed to personalize their homes, something Murray made sure he could do as an adult.

“There is definitely something about putting roots down, because I didn’t have that as a kid, in a lot of ways. We moved every two, three years,” Murray told the magazine. “So there is a part of me that’s like, ‘You got your place, your space, your house with your family. Make it yours.’” That was his first mission when they bought the house since it had a “very early-’90s” vibe. Their house covers 4,200-square-feet and has six bedrooms.

“It started with like, ‘Okay, there’s a drainage problem, so we’ll address that,’” Murray remembered. “And then you find other little things, and before we knew it, we were redesigning the landscaping and building a pool and Jacuzzi.” He jokingly added that during one point of the renovation process, he and Carrie lived in a tent for a year.

Although there were a few bumps in the road, Murray began embracing the creative process, obsessing over every tiny detail. “It got to the point where my wife even said to our designer, ‘Just talk to Sean about the details,’” he said. “I totally fell in love with it.”

Murray has starred in all 18 seasons of NCIS, although he was not introduced until the seventh episode of the first season. He joins Mark Harmon, who plays Leroy Jethro Gibbs; David McCallum, who plays Donald “Ducky” Mallard, and Brian Dietzen, who plays Jimmy Palmer, as the only members of the main cast to appear in every season. Before joining the show, he actually played two different characters on JAG, first Ensign Guitry in the episode “Innocence” and then Danny Walden in six episodes. Disney fans should also recognize him as Thackery Binx, the teenager cursed to live as a black cat in Hocus Pocus.