So Much Progress

This is the house this weekend.  We have a garage door and quite a few bricks!  I assume that it will be completely bricked and stoned (maybe not the correct term...) by the end of this week.  The inside has sheet rock and is floated (?) and there are doors, shelves and rods in the closets, and trim. 

The back has the most bricks and it is neat to see how what we picked out looks all in one place.

I took pictures on the inside, but the things that we think are really cool (like the ginormous pantry) are very difficult to photograph.  You can see this view from the living room into the dining room to get an idea of what the style of the house is.

In the midst of the difficult move, it is nice to see progress with the house and know that time is really going to fly now that the girls will be starting school soon and the pace at my work will really pick up with the fall semester starting.  More pictures to come soon as I just happen to know that more progress has definitely been made this week!

Goodbye...

Goodbye to all of this "stuff" that we think we need so much.  Saying goodbye is never easy, but it is easier knowing that we will see you again in less than three months (at least I sure hope it isn't any longer than that!)  I am curious to see how we do without you and how much we decide we don't want to come back into our new house.  Our 10x20 storage until is so full that there is very little room to put anything else (although a taller person than myself could have).  We will see you before we know it and hope that you all survive your time in the heat of the Texas summer.

Move is a Four Letter Word

This move was T.O.U.G.H.  We tried to be prepared ahead of time, we started packing early, we hired movers to help move the furniture to the storage unit, and still the move was not easy.  As I said before, I am not a good packer.  I get very tired of packing and overwhelmed.  Although we had lots and lots of boxes packed (and used every one that we got from our sweet friends) we still had things that we didn't put in boxes because we just didn't know how.  My parents and mother-in-law were super helpful with finishing packing and getting things to both the new house and the storage unit.  The movers helped for about 3 hours and got most of the things moved to storage.  My co-worker Paul came over and helped once they were gone and we still needed some muscle (I am sure he will be thrilled with that title!)

In case you are not from or have never been to Texas in July, it is EXTREMELY HOT.  With Joe's MS, he has problems with the heat and he struggled both physically and emotionally as he couldn't do all that he felt he should be able to do to help.  It was hard to watch him try to do too much and he actually ended up at the doctor on the Monday morning after the move because he could hardly walk.

We got the majority of the moving done on Saturday then Joe, Jessica, Laura, and I went back on Sunday afternoon to move everything else to the garage so that the person we were paying to clean the house could do it on Monday.  I worked on Monday morning and then went back to finish the garage on Monday afternoon by myself.  I'm not going to lie, I was terrified I couldn't get it done.  I took Tuesday off also so that I could do some other house things and didn't want to go back to finish the garage.  Well, I surprised myself and everyone else.  By 5:00, the garage looked like this:

I should have taken a "before" picture, but I think I would be embarrassed to show it to the world!  I was excited to be done at that house and I know that this part of our "house adventure" was probably the most difficult part.  We have vowed to get movers for our next move since they will get everything from storage and take it to the new house.  I have already got a few people lined up to help pack our little house when it is time and I will try to be better about asking for help (not one of my strong suits).

And I just keep trying to remind myself that it will all be worth it in two and a half months or so...

Transitions

Way behind on posting this post that I started a week and a half ago.  More to come soon about the actual move and house progress...

I work with college students with Aspergers and have a family member with Autism and people always talk about how transitions are difficult for them.  Guess what... transitions are difficult for me too!  This last week has been full of stress as we get ready for our first move.  We have moved lots of times.  I recently counted and by the time that we are in our new house in October, we will have lived in 11 different houses in less than 19 years.  I should have this down, right?  Absolutely not!  We are moving to our "twin city" so I would like to think of that as moving out of town given how much stress I am feeling.  Then I think about my friend Jenn (author of www.hobwas.wordpress.com... amazing blog that you should all check out) whose husband works for the State Department.  They move every few years and mostly out of the country!  If she lived a little closer, I would put her to work helping me :)

Anyway, we have started transitioning at our old house.  We put all three girls in one room on mattresses on the floor and it is working out great (much to my amazement).  We have started crating the dogs again since we will be in a small house with newly refinished floors and couches that don't belong to us.  They are still adjusting, but it has been MUCH better than I anticipated.  We are eating all the food from the freezer (okay, we got fast food last night because we just couldn't face the choices we had left... lima beans, yuck!).  Our packing is somewhat under control, although I turn one way and think we are doing great and then turn around and panic seeing how much we still have to do.  I am working most of this week, so I am trying to concentrate all the while thinking... "When we move, I will need to put the dogs on leashes every morning and take them through the front door since the back door would mean crawling across the girls" and "I wonder what day is trash day" and "If the movers come at 11, when do we need to get the truck and when should I have my parents come to help" and "How are we going to get the girls to and from school given that we live no where near where they are going to be going to school" and... okay, you get the picture.

And here is the picture that I am trying to keep in mind:

This is the way the girls like to go to get to the new house.  The roads are all paved, but there is one dirt road you can take and they love to go that way since it makes it feel "in the country."  I just think of this as the long road home :)

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...