Friday, November 27, 2009

Beautiful Chaos

Beautiful Chaos is the only way I can think of explaining my life at this moment. With much prayer and contemplation Daniel and I both realized that even though we wanted to go through with the move to Atlanta neither of us have actually heard a definite yes from God. So we decide we would continue to live in the mountains until God opened doors for us to leave when he had planned. Since we would be staying we desperately needed to find a bigger place to live. We were quickly running out of room in the little house we were in and had no additional space for entertaining or guest.

My parents know a couple who owns a rental house next door to theirs and the current tenants were being evicted for not paying rent for a YEAR! It is a 3 bedroom, 2 bath rancher with a detached apartment. My dad did a little bargaining with the landlords and they lowered rent $150 a month for us! He told them we couldn't pay as much as they were asking but we did promise to pay once a month! The house needed a little fixing up and since Daniel works on houses for a living we came up with a deal to fix up the house in exchange for getting our first months rent free! We were going to rent the apartment out to my foster sister who was wanting to move out but with her current job being seasonal it put a little damper on the financial side of things. In the end we were able to rent it out to Daniel's best friend Caleb, a former marine, who is in school part time and working for my dad part time. Renting the apartment out helps us out and at the same time it was able to get Caleb out of his parents house.

We started working on the house mid October so that we could be moved in by oct 31st. The house was built in the 60s and wasn't insulated, so our first project was to insulate the house. We cut out 3 rows of holes between each stud on the outer wall of every room and used Blow-in insulation. Needless to say we had NO CLUE what a task this would be in the end! The only way to imagine the amount of dust this created in our house is to envision your house being put inside a snow globe full of dusk and shake it really really hard! It was EVERYWHERE! You couldn't come inside the house without a mask on. It was sticking to the guys facial hair, eyebrows, ears, everything! We all looked like we had aged about 50 years by the time it was all done. We were sweeping and vacuuming up dusk for days. And filling the holes was another huge task in and of itself. We patched and sanded for another few days and were finally done! We paint the inside of the house from top to bottom, literally, ceiling to baseboards! Daniel tiled 2 bathroom floors and one of the bathrooms showers. We fixed plumbing problems and muddy well water problems.

We have been moved in for about a month now and besides minor details we're having to take care of we love it! Our old house could have fit as a whole in this house's kitchen! It is so spacious and has tons of windows! I will hopefully be able to post some before and after pictures soon!

A lot of stress has come with this remodeling project and Daniel and I are both incredibly exhausted! My poor husband has been sick for about a week also and is just pitiful. Thankfully we've had the time this Thanksgiving weekend to just last around and relax.

Sorry it has taken me so long to post a new blog, but hopefully with explaining the current madness of my life you will cut me some slack!

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