Ok, I know I said I wouldn’t post until Monday, but here it is Sunday morning, and I am up an hour before my alarm was supposed to go off and well.. We are in our house!

I don’t even know what to say to convey how wonderful everyone was that helped us. My mom (who is a saint, literally) has been here since Wednesday, cleaning things. And by cleaning things I mean, scrubbing the refrigerator out, all the bathrooms (those 3 words make it sound like nothing, but let me tell you that was a HUGE job), cleaning baseboards, dusting, vacuuming, washing the walls (i didn’t know you had to do that), and painting. I came home on lunch breaks to help her, but I wasn’t really able to sink my teeth into it until Thursday night. Mike’s dad was here on Wednesday too…he pressure washed the entire house, garage, and driveway, and he painted the inside of the garage and did some landscaping. Did I mention he just got stitches out on his back? These parents are COMMITTED. Wow. My dad was around a lot, fixing the garage door, making sure we were doing things right, and giving out daddy advice, and he bought everyone lunch while we were moving, and he helped me not have a melt down a few times. Yes, that was a run-on sentence. Mike’s mom was also very involved in us getting this house…banks don’t want to give out home loans right now and she was able to pull lots of strings and make it happen, not to mention they GAVE us their washer and dryer. OUR PARENTS ARE AWESOME, and they each helped in their own different ways, and everything worked out perfectly.

Then there are the friends who helped us move on Saturday. It took about 2 hours to load up the uHaul, and ONLY 10 MINUTES to unload it. BAM we were done. We had some awesome people helping and we would’ve been sunk without them.

We’ll spend Monday painting and touching up some stuff. I’ll post pictures later!

So if you’ve been reading for longer than a week you know that we’ve been on the hunt for houses for the past few months. Nothing is working for us…too big, too small, too expensive, too perfect. I want character, he wants classic. Well, finally, we found a house we both like, and it kind of looks like this:

No lie. It caught fire a while back (in the past few months I’m thinking). It needs a brand new roof and it needs to be completely gutted and redone inside. But that is perfect, because Mike gets his “newness” inside, and I get my “character” (seriously, a house that has come back from a fire has character no matter what you say. I’ll name it phoenix.) We’d basically get to purchase this piece of junk house that is roughly 3,000 sq feet under roof and do what we want to with it. It’s in a great neighborhood, it’s got a nice yard.

It’s also terrifying to think we’re going to put all our eggs in a basket where the handle is almost completely burnt off. We’d probably have to bunk in with parents for 6-7 months while construction takes place (eeek!).

God says he can get beauty from ashes.
Here’s hoping that applies to construction.