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Recently I mowed my own lawn for the first time. That was fun. Now I have embarked on an ambitious plan to fix our ghetto driveway, make our grass look better then the Jones’s, and build a little pathway up the driveway out of pavers. We still only have half the doors mounted inside the house and no molding installed, but it’s ok because external appearances are what really matter.

(note: insert a proper amount of sarcasm when you read the above non-fictional post)

Joel

Sadly we are having another miscarriage. We made it almost to 9 weeks, went in for our first doctor appointment, and everything was going fine except for Natalie had been bleeding a tiny bit that week. They were able to get us in for an ultrasound that day and that’s when we found out that the baby wasn’t living anymore. It was only the size of a 6-7 week old baby. We got confirmation the next day from the blood test which indicated that the hormone levels were dropping. We grieve this loss of our child, but know that it is in heaven with God. We are thankful that the doctors have solutions to stuff like this, and we will be seeing a specialist to help us make sure the next one survives. Life is so sad sometimes, but God is always good and we feel His love in this hard time.

Joel

Sweat equity. That pretty much sums it up. At least we hope it will result in equity, because there’s been lots of sweat, some blood, some drool, some tears, some toilet water, some old drain water, lots of rotten floor, some mold, a bit of rat poop, lots of money spent, and rather little sleep gotten. Even if it doesn’t result in much equity there will still be much blessing, learning, time with loved ones, and enjoyment of the fruits of our labor.

When we got the keys to the house on September 15th we jumped right in; in fact we tore out the old greasy cabinets that Sunday night. We proceeded to work on various projects such as painting, re-doing the main bathroom, and replacing cabinets, and after a couple weeks we noticed this rug that was left in the house when the previous owners moved out.

I got a little curious when I stepped on part of the rug right near the door and it squeaked. I was a bit wary since the reason for us re-doing the whole bathroom was because some water had gotten in to the flooring and caused a bunch of rot. When I pulled the rug back, to my shock and horror I found this.

What this meant was that our 270 square foot kitchen/dining room had to have new flooring installed. People who know me can probably guess that I’m not one to just cover it back up with a rug and be OK with a big hole in the vinyl flooring. It was time for Pergo. I was pretty frustrated about this added expense, but I guess it’s a good excuse to have a really nice looking floor. I decided to lift up the piece of wood to see what would be revealed underneath.

Ewwwwww. Talk about rot. This must have been a really bad leak because you could take a screwdriver and stick it through all the way to the crawlspace. The previous owner did a half-repair and decided not to fix the subfloor. I’m kind of surprised that the home inspectors didn’t find it, but it was pretty well hidden by the rug during the inspection, and from below the insulation hid it. So the previous owner was a jerk, and now we’ll have Pergo.

Since we were putting Pergo in the kitchen, new vinyl in the bathroom, and the carpet looked horrible, we decided to just replace all of the flooring. Today we just got finished putting the tile in the entryway

The bathrooms will both have vinyl because we hear it’s warmer on the feet then tile, and it’s also a lot cheaper. We already bought the new carpet but it’s sitting in our garage waiting for the rest of the flooring to get done so that it can be installed properly. Here’s a picture of the huge roll (on the right) along with the rest of our belongings.

Basically everything we own is in that garage except for our bed, our clothes, and our couch. Now back to the carpet…when I went to pick it up I took Natalie’s parent’s van since it can take a long load really easily. Everything went smoothly picking it up, but when the forklift set the roll inside the van I started thinking, “How am I getting this out?”. It was going to rain later that day and the carpet stuck out about 2 feet from the back of the van, so I couldn’t just leave it parked at the house. When I got home I backed the van up to the garage and gave the roll a real hard push. No dice. It didn’t even budge. The thing weighs like 400 pounds, and I’m not exaggerating.

I eventually figured out a system where I would push the carpet at an angle, then roll it to one side of the van, then push back, then roll back, and so on until it was about half way out. Once I got it there I stuck a moving dolly on the ground so the carpet could be moved once it came out. I continued with my system until it was almost all the way out, then I was able to somehow push it out on to another moving dolly so the roll had support at both ends. In the future I know to just have the carpet installer pick up the carpet.

Speaking of carpet installers. Our next-door-neighbor’s wife is the home-owner-association’s president. She is also a very angry woman at times. The first few nights we were in the house she literally screamed at us for keeping her young children from sleeping. We eventually figured out that 8:30 is about her curfew for loud noise, and it’s been fine since we’ve been minding that, but the good thing about all this is that her husband is a professional flooring installer. Because of her yelling and screaming he offered to install our carpet for free. Yay!

One thing that we did going in to all of this was look on Cragslist to find used stuff that would save us some money. We bought light fixtures, drywall tools, plywood, and other small stuff from there. We also bought dishwashers. You will notice that I said “dishwashers”, not “a dishwasher”. Here are the 2 dishwashers that we bought on Craigslist.

These dishwashers are out in the rain for a reason. They don’t work. The Craigslist ads said they did, and the sellers thought they did (or were really good liars), but the first one didn’t work for one of it’s cycles, and the second one spewed water all over our kitchen floor. So a word of wisdom, don’t buy appliances on Craigslist unless you can test them first. The 3rd and final dishwasher we bought came new from Lowes and it works great. By the way, if anyone needs a dishwasher installed I am now very experienced.

So here is where we’re at now. The kitchen cabinets are done, the countertops and sink are installed, the dishwasher is replaced, and the fridge and stove are out of place because the flooring has been getting replaced. The new underlayment in the kitchen/dining room just got finished being nailed in today, so Pergo installation starts tomorrow. Here’s a pic of the dining room from today.

And here’s my younger brother Daniel installing cabinets a few weeks ago.

The whole interior of the house has been painted except for the master bathroom. We had to paint everything in the house because there was some serious food odor throughout the house, not to mention that one of the bedrooms was Pepto-Bismol pink, and this one was lime-green.

The bedrooms are now earthy tones of green, brown, and yellow. The kitchen and bathroom are earthy blue, and the hall and living room are earthy tan. We like the earthy-tones because they are relaxing and homey feeling.

We’ve got the tile in the entry done, we need to install Pergo still, we need to install the new-to-us doors and trim, and we have some finish work to do on the countertops. The bedrooms are pretty much good-to-go except that we’re going to install light fixtures in them since they don’t have any right now. The only light fixtures built in to the house are in the bathrooms, hall, and dining/kitchen room. That’s gonna change. Once we get the Pergo done and get the new vinyl put in the master bath we will call our neighbor over and have him do our carpet. Then we’ll FINALLY be able to actually move in to our house. I’m so excited to be able to watch TV or a movie, and it will be nice to not be working on the house all night, every night.

It’s amazing how much more time it’s taken then I thought. I figured we would have everything done in 2-3 weeks. It’s going to be more like 2 months. Granted, we have had some setbacks that we didn’t plan for such as replacing the whole kitchen floor, but I still significantly under-estimated the time it would take.

One thing that has made everything go much quicker has been the help we’ve received. Our church Ethnos tends to help each other out pretty well, and we took advantage of that for our demolition and painting. We had at least 15 people from Ethnos help out. I’ll always remember several guys from the Sanders’ community group tearing out the nasty toilet in the main bathroom and just totally not caring about how gross it was, that’s an awesome example of serving others. It was also really encouraging to have so much help with the painting. It tends to take a lot of time and energy to paint, but with all the help that we had it went really quickly.

Natalie and I also had a bunch of family members helping out. Natalie’s sisters helped us pack and move our stuff, (along with Matt Hartzell who was our lone Ethnos helper for the move, thanks Matt; and some Reinmuth guys lended some muscle too). My dad and brothers installed cabinets, countertops, and bathroom flooring. All of this help has been a huge blessing to us and we’ll never be able to communicate our appreciation for it enough but THANK YOU to everyone who helped. We’ll have a house-warming party in a few weeks so we can all celebrate the hard work. We’ve got a ways to go before it’s done enough to really rest, but we can see the light at the end of the tunnel.