Renovating, part 1

Hello, summer of renovating a house! 

Evan and I have experienced many hard things in our 10 years of marriage, but this one sits pretty high up on the list. This season is pretty crazy for our family, but God has been so gracious and faithful! 

We closed on the house on June 3, which was about a week and a half earlier than we expected. This was due to my persistent husband and the power of prayer, but SO huge since people in the house buying world rarely get in a hurry. :) Once we closed, Evan got to work immediately--demolition work, getting bids for projects, and just getting everything in the house checked out. We are doing things much like you would if you were building from the ground up (which we've already decided would be easier!) so we had to come up with a plan to submit to our banker and appraiser. We were both a little nervous about the appraisal because we'd heard from so many people they almost always come back lower than expected. Thankfully, ours happened last week and appraised for close to what we thought. Such a huge blessing!

The demo work is almost finished and we should close on the construction loan in a couple of days, so hopefully the ball will be rolling on the fun part very soon.

This is what the house looks like right now:

Top-two bedrooms/two bathrooms

Bottom Right-kitchen/dining

Bottom Left-living room

Part of the reason the demo has taken SOOOOO long is because every wall in the bedroom end(with the exception of about two) was covered with tongue and groove paneling...even the ceiling. Evan had to remove it all plank by plank! I know, I know! This stuff is super trendy right now, but a lot of it was just not in good condition. Plus, we are converting the original living room into a bedroom and adding some closet space, so all the paneling just had to go in order to make the house more uniform.  We did save some of the paneling, so I hope to re-purpose it if possible. 

While Evan has had help a few times, he's done most of the demo work himself. This makes for some very long days for everyone. Evan will work all day, we will eat dinner together, then he will go work on the house until wee hours. Early on in the process, he was working until like 2:00 in the morning, but thankfully he's cut back on those hours! Needless to say, crazy hours combined with crazy living arrangements (more on that in a sec!) have just made for crazy people altogether! Once the demo work is finished (which should be within days!), we hope to contract out a lot of the work. 

Let's just say we've had an adventure with our living conditions. My prayer in the beginning of all this was that we would only have to move once, but God obviously had different plans for us! It's been wild, but I'm thankful for His provision and the lessons I'm learning in flexibility through all this.

 Initially, we moved into a 5th wheel camper (see bottom left pic!). I know this seems so insane, but at the beginning of this whole process the plan was to hurry and get the bedroom end finished so we could live in it while we finished the living room and kitchen end. We weren't completely sure how long all the renovations would take, so it didn't seem wise to jump into renting a house or an apartment and having to pay a second set of deposits. Once we realized the renovations were going to take A LOT longer and I owned up to the fact that I couldn't handle being in a camper with my children all day, I started praying for God to provide a better option for us. Guess what?! He did! We have some church members who have a small apartment inside their barn (top picture) and we've moved into it. It is really a great temporary space. We are all sleeping in one bedroom, there are no closets, and only have about 4 PBS channels to watch, but I do have a washer and dryer and the kids have several places to play during the day. 

Before we moved into the barn apartment, we committed to house-sit for some friends this week (hello, wi-fi!) and that's been a fun change of pace. Their house is so cozy, it almost feels like we are on a vacation. We are watering plants, picking up the daily paper, and checking the garden. 

As I started going through pictures to post on here, I became overly aware of how my attitude about this whole process has been pretty crummy. It is just a HARD season, and I feel like all I'm doing is maintaining. To be honest, when I'm in the middle of all of it, the days are long. It seems my time is spent playing referee to sister fights or cleaning up Barrett messes. When I started looking at these pictures, though, I started realizing how full our days truly are:

Playing outside, picking green beans from the Compton's garden, swimming, swimming and more swimming, laying around watching movies, staying up late, overcoming our fear of dogs, lazy mornings playing outside before the sun is high in the sky, having princess parades, swimming lessons, VBS hopping, visiting shut-in church members, afternoon naps, library trips, tie-dying t-shirts, play-dates with friends...

Hopefully when summer comes to a close, we have a finished house and lots of fun memories!