Life changes

I have been meaning to write about a few things that have taken place over the last 8 months in hopes that someday I’ll be able to look back on this season in life and laugh a little while smiling and thanking God that everything turned out just fine in the end.  God is faithful and I’m finally ready to publish what I began writing back in November of 2012.

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I never would have dreamed that when we accepted an offer on our house at the end of August that we were setting the craziest time of our lives into motion.  I’m sure anyone who has had kids start a new school, sold their house, moved, rented, OR had a baby would tell you that it can be a bit stressful.  Did you notice I said “or?”  Can you imagine doing all of those things at once?  In our case, that “or” should read “and.”  I still can’t believe that’s the path we embarked on back in August.  (Well, technically I found out I was pregnant in June, but anyway…)

We should have been excited that we actually got an offer on our house relatively quickly, right?  Well, we were, but the catch was we had a month to move out.  At least that’s what it said on paper.  In reality, we had much less than that.  First, we had to wait for the inspection to go through.  (No sense packing anything until that passed, right?)  Then we had to wait for the appraisal to be completed and returned.  (Again, it didn’t make sense to pack much before that was approved because if the house didn’t appraise for enough, the whole offer would fall apart.  And our agent wasn’t 100% confident our house would appraise high enough.  So why bother packing if you’d just have to unpack?)  So we waited, and waited, losing precious packing time with every day that passed.  Finally, on September 20th, we got a call saying that the numbers looked good and we would be closing in a week.  That’s right, a week!  We knew this was the date all along, but we really weren’t sure everything would fall into place.  I quickly started making phone calls to line up a storage container for all of our stuff and sent out a plea to family and friends to help us pack up our entire house.  Oh, and we also needed to find a temporary place to live.  Minor detail, right?

Saturday morning, we had a crew of awesome help show up and start loading & packing, packing & loading.  By late afternoon, “The Big Blue Box” we had rented was full as was my parents’ trailer.  My kitchen cupboards were bare, rooms were empty, and it looked like we were actually going to have a chance at getting everything out of the house by  the closing on the 28th.  I am still in awe of all that was accomplished in one day.  I don’t think we could have asked for a better group of people to help us in such a short amount of time.

The rest of the week we continued to pack smaller items, leaving the beds until the very end.  We moved them to the rental house I found on Craigslist on Thursday.  (More on that house later.)  We had a series of “lasts” in the house that we tried to capture in photos – last dinner, bath time, bed time, etc.  Even as we went to bed that last night in the house, I think I was still a little in disbelief that we were not going to be living in that house anymore.  With all of our belongings gone, it didn’t really feel like our home anymore, but the reality of us actually moving somewhere else hadn’t officially hit me quite yet.  That was still to come.

The move to the rental house went smoothly.  Again, with some great helping hands, the blue box was emptied into the garage and house very quickly.  I should take a step back though.  The rental itself was not in very good condition when we were ready to move in on Thursday.  Having previously been rented for 8 years, the landlord was attempting to get it in to a rentable state again, however, we found out too late that he came up extremely short of that goal.  The place was downright disgusting.  Friends and family spent hours just getting the place livable.  And when I say livable, I just mean clean.  Who in their right mind rents a place in the state this house was in?  I guess we did.  Like I said, we were short on time and jumped at the first place with enough space to store our belongings while we looked for a new home.

Cleaning the house was one ordeal.  Finding all of the broken or non-functioning things while living in the house was another.  Here’s what we encountered in our little rental house in 7 months: The kitchen sink leaked (but did get fixed.) The dishwasher didn’t work. (Once replaced, the water leading to it leaked into the basement for a week, causing damage to the ceiling and wall – water also leaked behind the electrical panel.)  Apparently a constant leak into the basement wasn’t a huge concern for our landlord.  The fridge constantly ran and had broken shelves, the bathtub jets leaked into the basement bathroom, toilets didn’t flush without holding down the levers, and the washing machine didn’t work.  We were without a washer for TWO WEEKS until we ended up bringing in our own.  What kind of landlord doesn’t return phone calls or texts when a family of five renting a property is without a functioning washer that was promised in the rental listing?  (Thankfully, my mom was kind enough to do many loads for us during those two weeks.)  We negotiated a rent reduction since we brought in our own (functional) machine.  The garage door opened, but the track looked as if it was going to break in half.  Brackets actually broke on the door and had to be fixed.  Then a short time later, the door quit closing on its own when using the remote button.  The sliding back door became more and more difficult to open and close as the temperatures got colder, and the screen door was completely useless.  The oven only heated to one temperature…hot, and to top it all off, the furnace died in February on one of the coldest days of the year…the day Little #4 was born.

Just re-reading that list makes me shake my head in disbelief.

I turned in our keys to the place we called “the rental house,” today.  I couldn’t bring myself to ever call the place “home” for numerous reasons, but primarily because I needed to hold onto the hope that we would find a real place to call home again.  Thanks to the prayers of so many, we finally can.