Packing Day

We are getting close to the big (or small) move!  Next Saturday we get the moving truck from the storage place and load it up with all of our things that we won't see for the next three months or so.  We have been packing here and there for awhile, but today was a big push to get a lot done.  I think we were pretty successful.

 I am too tired to try to get better pictures.  You get the idea.  These are all boxes going into storage (along with most of the furniture).  I never knew we had so many books (along with lots of other stuff!).  We decided this week that we are going to have a moving and storage company come get the piano and store it, so that is one less thing we will have to move next week.  We also have several things on Craigslist mostly hoping to get someone to come get them rather than us move them!  We had great help from my mom, Joe's mom, and our friend Ms. Gracie today.  We never would have stayed motivated without them!

Along with packing, we decided to get the girls ready for the temporary house (or "wee house" as my mom likes to call it).  They will all be sleeping on mattresses on the floor in the same room, so we moved all the mattresses to Jessica's room so they could get used to it before we moved.  Here is their set up for the next week:

Wait, where are the girls?  They went to stay with Gram and Grandy tonight.  So much for getting used to the new arrangement!

As Promised...

So I felt a little bad posting my blog post last night given that we went to church on Sunday and Blake preached about gratitude.  In general, I think that I practice gratitude pretty faithfully.  I still have jealousy over things that I wish I had or frustrations about things I think aren't fair, but in general, I have a pretty positive outlook on life and try to look for blessings in every difficult situation.

It is actually easy to be grateful given our current living situation.  After I posted on Facebook a couple of weeks ago about looking for a place to live, I had a response from a friend who told me about a friend of hers who was going to rent out their house.  I contacted her, but they were really looking for someone more long term.  However, she talked to another friend of hers who was interested.  It turns out that this friend is actually a sweet friend of mine!!  (Did you follow all that?)

I had gone to lunch with a wonderful group of friends a couple of weeks ago and my friend Carmen was telling me about her dad's house and how she was going to manage it and rent it out for home football games while her parents were in the North and then they would come down and live in the house during the winter months.  Neither of us thought about my family moving in instead of renting it out for football games until her friend mentioned it to her!  This is the house that we are going to move into in a little less than two weeks...   

What is so amazing for us is that Carmen's dad is just finished renovating the house.  It is incredibly cute on the inside and my girls fell in love with it when they saw it, even though all three girls will be sharing one bedroom!  Carmen (and her dad) are giving us a wonderful deal which will help us with our down payment and moving costs.  It is not in the right school district, but since we have a contract on a house in the new one, we should be okay.  The house is furnished and we will be moving in clothes, bedding, kitchen items, and personal things and that is about it.  Everything else is going to storage!  That should actually make our second move easier as there will be very little to pack.

I can't lie, I am a little nervous about all of us being in a two bedroom/one bathroom (!) house together for three months.  I have friends who did it, though, and said that there were things they missed about it when they had a little more room.  I think we will enjoy the house and when we move into a house over twice the size, we may miss the closeness a little bit (okay, maybe not too much).

And just to keep us inspired through the closeness, we will keep going to visit this house...

Rough Week

I'm having a little blogger's apathy here.  I was trying to be good at writing and there actually is progress on the house, but it has been a rough week. As a matter of fact, I started writing this a week ago, didn't finish, then left for a conference for work and am just now getting back to it. 

There have been a few issues with the design of the house and they are having to make some changes to accommodate some extra duct work (or something... I let Joe handle that stuff).  When there are changes, plans have to be drawn and approved and that takes time.  Time is not our friend right now.  The good news is that we are going to have an "architectural detail" in our game room because we have to put a column-like extension on the wall to accommodate the extra duct work.  This is Joe's drawing of what it will look like...

There is a reason he is not an artist.  I think it is all a scam so we will have to get a large screen TV to hang on the wall (the rectangle in the middle).

Anyway, our floor plan isn't a common one and they want to make sure that it is done correctly (which I appreciate).  I call this the octopus...

And here is where it comes out into the game room...

There has been quite a bit of work on the plumbing and electrical work and the roof was finished in time for the rainy week that we had this past week, so there are many things happening to get closer to the house being done.  Tons of sheet rock are sitting in the house and it will hopefully be time to put it up soon.  The rock and brick are both sitting in the driveway and I will blog pictures of that soon.

The biggest reason for the rough week had nothing to do with the house building, but the need for temporary housing.  We move out in two weeks and as of the time that I left for the conference last Sunday, we didn't know where we were going.  And to find out what is happening with that, you will have to read my next post...