As you can see I've been playing catch up on this ol' blog. That means we have a computer, which means we are in our new house!! I mentioned how we had come to look at it on Sunday and were so upset by what we saw. Well we took pics of everything and came home and I wrote an e-mail to someone higher up to let them know what was going on. I knew we weren't going to get any results with the ladies we had been working with up until then, and I wasn't messing around anymore. Monday morning AS I'm driving over to the title company to meet Kenny and sign our closing documents, I get a phone call from the building company. It wasn't a pleasant conversation (for her), as I was tired of this whole thing and was pretty forceful and noticeably upset by it all. Anyway, we finally got some results. She sent some guys in to clean it all up and fix everything they should have already done. We went that night to see it and it was so nice--just how it should have been at first.
So Tuesday morning bright and early we woke the kids up around 6 and had everything ready to go in the van. Anja got dropped off at 6:15 and we came over here to what was officially our house. Kenny helped me put the couches in (which is a whole funny story in itself) and a few other things then he went to work. Our appliances didn't come AGAIN on the day they were supposed to, and didn't end up getting there till Wednesday afternoon. Not so fun living without a fridge, I will say that. Or a W&D. Our family produces a lot of laundry rather quickly. But we finally are in and trying to get everything settled. We have a lot less space than we're used to. The unit is 1450 square feet, which is pretty tight and cozy for our family. But we've talked about it a lot and it'll be good for us to really learn to simplify, and distinguish wants and needs, getting rid of "extras". We will learn to live on the essentials and not worry about anything else. I don't mind doing that, it's just hard when we're now trying to get rid of stuff we already have, but literally have no room for it. I feel like I'm being wasteful. We're also entertaining the idea of keeping things in our garage (like the piano) and just turning the heat up in the garage so it's like an extra room out there. But it means Kenny would never be able to park in the garage, and that's not very fun with the amount of snow we get and how cold it is. Anyway, it's a work in progress and I feel like it's all coming along. We were finally able to make some visible difference this weekend since Kenny had Friday and Sat. off. We knocked a lot off of our to-do list and now everyone has a bed to sleep in, and even blinds on their windows! All the girls are in one room, and Ty is in the other. Except we have misplaced the bag of screws that goes along with the bunk bed, so their already small room is even more cramped with the beds we have in there. Oh the silly little things. It's so discouraging to think of how much *stuff* we still have in the storage unit. WHERE oh where are we going to put it?!
Also, our van decided this would be a good week to break down. We've been looking around casually for a while, sort of waiting for a good deal, but not in a rush to buy. But once it was too scary to drive, and we didn't have the luxury of time, Kenny really worked hard at finding a good car for our family. He said we were not going to put any more money into that van that already had 165,000 miles on it and was continually having problems. So time that should have and could have been spent unpacking and setting up house, turned into driving around town to dealerships and other people that put their cars up for sale on craigslist. But he persevered and found a nice 2008 Honda Odyssey with about 60,000 miles on it. That might sound like a lot to some people, but I've never had a car with less than 100,000 miles, so it's really nice for me! :) We were grateful to find a great car in the price range we wanted.
We found a nice young family that's going to rent out the other side, and they're moving in tomorrow. They have a cute little 2 yr. old boy and though I haven't met the husband yet (he works on the slope), the wife is great.
I really, really enjoyed conference this weekend. I am grateful for Sunday, this day of rest, where we took a break from working so hard and just relaxed together as a family, ate cinnamon rolls, and listened to the inspiring messages. We had dinner this evening at the Sponsellers, which we always love.
We are excited to get on a consistent schedule and get back into the swing of things!
