Happy Birthday, Lydia!

Oh, Christmas Tree

We were so excited this year to be able to continue our tradition of chopping down our own family Christmas tree! Last year, what with being knee deep in packing boxes preparing for our move to Lincoln, we weren't able to do it. So sad. And because we moved right before Christmas, we just ended up getting one of the last forlorn trees from the grocery store parking lot by our rental house. Although, strangely, it was actually one of the better trees we've gotten. But anyways. Still not the same as cutting it down ourselves with plenty of hot chocolate and fun times afterward!

The tree ended up being a little hilariously on the ginormous side once we actually got it into the house. It's funny how they never seem to look that big, you know, when they're in a field surrounded by hundreds of other trees. And we really thought we were picking one of the smaller ones. Oh well, making up for our lost year, right? The girlies had a great time decorating, and it was so, so nice to be in our house.

Now onto finishing up my Christmas shopping so we have some stuff to stick under it...

Iris Goes to Kindergarten

And you know what? We survived our first week.

Iris is totally fine. Super grown up and acting all casual about going to school as if she's been doing it for years. The lump in my throat at drop off these past few days has been mostly for me, I think, missing her and trying to get used to her not being around all day. Lydia and I are going to have to figure out a new normal.

So yeah, I guess, onward we proceed. I'm actually kind of excited about all the things that come with having a school age kid now. Curriculum nights, PTO meetings, lunch money, homework - and the really super fun stuff like learning to read and write sentences and spell and do math.

Hmm...I think I'm going to have to concentrate on the possibilites, and dare I say it: the unknown of this coming year. It kind of makes the ache a little less...

And the Training Wheels Bite the Dust

Yup, that's right.

Iris can now officially ride her bike without training wheels.

We actually took them off about a month ago because all the neighborhood kids could ride their bikes without training wheels, and she was worried about being left behind. But she was a little too freaked out by that tricky balance thing, and so her bike sat forlornly in our garage...until a few days ago when she suddenly experienced a burst of determination and figured it out. We are SO proud!

And just for fun times, here's some footage of the girlies biking together:

Pretty cute, huh.

Sometimes Dreams Really Do Come True

Target + groceries = The most PERFECT store EVER!

Strawberry Pickin'

We ventured to the strawberry patch for the first time ever last week. We've seriously never been strawberry picking which is a kind of strange, I think, especially considering that I'm pretty sure there was a little patch right down the road from us practically right in our neighborhood in Missouri. I guess maybe we were really focused on apples and pumpkins?

Anyways, we went, and the girls loved it! Lydia ate so many strawberries while picking I was afraid she'd explode, or at the very least, turn into a strawberry (hee, hee). Her mouth looked like she was channeling Twilight so stained was it with juice:

Even Iris got in on the eating action:

And they were both great picking sidekicks:

(silly Lolls, sneaking bites when she thinks I'm not looking!)

We definitely want to do this again. Aw...our first Nebraska tradition. And it looks like it may be sooner rather than later considering the fact that I left the box of strawberries sitting on top of our refrigerator, got distracted and forgot about them until about three days later. Not a pretty sight. Oops!

The Big Reveal

The outside of our house is finally finished! Yay! We are absolutely thrilled with the way it turned out. Never did we ever imagine it would look this good! We hoped, of course, but oh, my goodness! It's like a completely different house now.

Remember this beauty?

This is what it looks like now:

Is the transformation not amazing? When we pulled off all that asbestos siding, we uncovered that lovely little oval window and original shake shingles. How fun is that? I LOVE original details!

Are you ready for more?

Here's the driveway side:

Before

After

The other side:

Before

After

The back:

Before


After

The garage:

Before


After

So what do you think? Is it not crazy how much this house has transformed? We have to constantly pinch ourselves when we pull into our driveway to make sure it's not a dream, that this is really our house! And we can't say thank you enough to my dad and his crew who drove to Lincoln almost every day for four months and poured their blood (literally!), sweat, and tears (wait...those were my tears!) to make our dream a reality. Did they not do a completely fabulous job? I'm so lucky to have such a talented dad and sister!

Next up on our list, or Phase Three as we like to call it, is some landscaping. I'm sure you noticed from the pictures what a sad state our yard is in. Most of this is in large part due to the sewer pipe replacement that took place in our back yard this past January. Digging a fifteen foot deep trench with 4 feet of snow on the ground doesn't make for a lovely yard come spring.

But that is all in good time. Right now we're just languishing, catching our breath a little, enjoying our house!

Yes, We're Still Around...

...in case anyone was wondering, since I just looked at the date from the last time I posted, and it's been over two months! Yikes!

My big plan when we moved to Lincoln and started working on our house was to document the process step by step on our blog, you know, because this blog is supposed to function as a sort of on-line scrapbook of our family and all that. Obviously, my plan has not worked out like I had hoped. But, oh my goodness, once we actually closed on the house and started working, our little remodeling extravaganza took on a life of it's own, consuming every corner of my life...and brain, for that matter. There just hasn't been much time or energy left over at the end of the day for much of anything. Add to that a twenty minute commute one way from our tiny rental four times a day and no internet connection, and you can see why posting has been low on my priority list.

However, now we are actually IN our house (yay! yay! yay!). AND we have internet connection, so I'll be posting our progress more often. The transformation of this house has been just so incredible. The inside is almost unrecognizable from its former self (a very good thing, unless wallpaper and hideous brown carpet are your thing) and the outside, oh the outside! I'm super excited about the outside! And I'm also super thankful for my dad and sister Rachel, who are helping to keep the vision alive and within reach. Their very presence keeps the blood pressure down, and they do a great job of calmly reassuring me (sometimes so many times I'm sure they want to claw off their ears) that yes, we CAN do this, which has been especially helpful on the days when I want to expire from despair!

So, without furthur ado, here's a little slide show of some of our progress. I'll warn you, though, it's not the greatest slide show ever created. These are some of the most distracted days I've ever experienced and in this season of life organization is not my strong suit. Another post entirely, however. I think you'll be able to get a general idea, and some day, probably far in the future, I'd love to go room by room and do a little before and after segment. I think that would be fun!

Stay tuned next week for some outside photos...

Settling

We have just completed our third week here in Lincoln. It seems hard to believe that soon we will have lived here for an entire month – a bittersweet milestone in and of itself.

I’m still suffering pretty acutely from homesickness. Sadly, I think it’s going to take more than a month to get over that. Daily I have to restrain myself from the urge to childishly stomp my feet and wail at the top of my voice – when at Target, at the grocery store, driving around town – “But it’s not the same!”.

Sigh.

The girls, on the other hand, are doing amazingly well considering the huge amount of chaos and life upheaval they’ve just been through. Everything they’ve ever known has changed, and they are handling it beautifully. Their calm acceptance of the situation has been one of the biggest ways we’ve seen God caring for us throughout this time. It’s made the transition so much easier. Although, I have to admit, Todd and I had a bit of a laugh one night about a week in when they both started asking when we were going home. Apparently, they were thinking maybe we were on an extended vacation of some sort. Not so much, sweet girlies.

Iris had her first day of school at her new preschool this past Monday. She was fine. Again, nary a tear. I, again, was weepy. For some reason, Iris going to a new school has been the thing that has crushed me lately. I’m sure it has something to do with the issues I’m having with letting go. I imagine I'll be equally as weepy when we get new doctors, change our licenses, get new library cards – you know, when we start doing all the things that mean we are beginning to establish ourselves here.

So that’s kind of where we are at the moment. It's been very nice to find out that Lincoln is still familiar almost eight years later. It's all coming back. And our little rental house is cozy (literally! It's barely 700 sq. ft) and becoming more home-like by the week.

We're hanging in there, despite homesickness and being buried under piles of snow and bitter cold, just taking it one day at a time.

Our (Soon to be!) New House

I'm sitting here in our empty house, it's our very last night here, and I thought now would be a perfect time to give you all a little tour of the house we are buying in Lincoln.

We are excited about this house! I have to say, though, that when we went to look at it, we had no intention of making an offer on it. We were actually taking a little breather, trying to make up our minds if we were going to put an offer on a completely different house, and we went to look at this house on a whim because we were kind of curious to see what the inside might look like on a house whose outside looked so deplorable.

I don't know, something just clicked when we were looking around. This house felt like it could be a home, although I have to admit it clicked for me a bit sooner than it did for Todd. He was actually walking around making fun of its dilapidated condition with our real estate agent and was rather shocked to hear that I thought this was the one! However, he soon came around. I think the fact that we were able to get it for a rock bottom price warmed him up considerably, and then once it became clear that we could do a type of loan that would allow us to wrap up most of the major renovations into our mortgage, he warmed up completely.

And it really is exactly the perfect fit for us. It's old, it's a fixer, it's a two story, it's in the neighborhood we wanted to be in, you know, all the things we were looking for, and by the time the dust clears with all the re-fabbing, we'll actually be ending up with a pretty nice looking old house. A dream come true. And for a price that won't break our bank. Yay!

Are you ready to see it?

This is the front of our home of homes. Not very pretty, right? But picture it with lovely new vinyl siding and a new roof. We're considering a color scheme of chocolate brown, creamy taupe, and gorgeous deep burnt orange.

And here's a side view. I'm not sure what the previous owners were thinking with the mustard yellow, but I'm ridiculously excited about this hedge of bushes separating our property from our neighbor's!

The back. As you can see, there is no exit on the back of the house. We'll be replacing that small window (which is above the washer/dryer in the kitchen on the inside) with a door, and relocating the washer and dryer to the upstairs bathroom.

Can you believe this is our garage? It looks pretty scary now, but it too will be completely refabbed with new siding and a new roof and a very nice carriage-style garage door.

So that's the outside...ready for some inside pics?

This is the door leading into our living room from the entry way. Look at all that lovely wood!

This is a view into our dining room from the front door. The little room beyond the dining room will start off as our family room and then eventually end up as a small library with floor to ceiling bookshelves. There has to be a place to put the 40 boxes of books we just packed up!

The kitchen


The living room

Lolly on the stairs

Lolly in the upstairs bathroom. This tub will be moving downstairs as part of a future bathroom/kitchen/laundry room renovation.

This room will be the girls'. There's an unfinished sunroom/porch beyond the door which I think will probably end up being their playroom.

The spare room

And last but not least, our bedroom. We have a little sunroom as well through those french doors. Pretty fun, huh?

So that's our house! The pictures aren't that great, but I think you can still get some idea of where we'll eventually be living. The inside of the house is actually in pretty good shape - just a lot of cosmetic work to be done. But we're up for the challenge. My mind is already teeming with lots of ideas - I can't wait to get in there and get to work!

End of Days

Our house is sold!

I've been wanting to write about it for awhile, but there have been so many what ifs and doubts and fears clouding my brain these past few weeks as we've waded through the craziness of inspections and appraisals and trying to find a new house in Lincoln and all the subsequent craziness that has come as a result of actually finding a house in Lincoln, that at first I was too afraid (it appears I have some growing to do in the faith and trust department) and now there just hasn't been a lot of time!

Everything has turned out fine. Is that not usually the way it happens? I worry, worry, worry, and usually for no good reason other than to make myself looney. Our buyers have received their loan commitment, and there was only one "minor" setback which resulted from our inspection. We had to install a radon mitigation system which came as a rather unpleasant and expensive surprise. Fun! But as a sort of off set to our irritation over our radon issue, Todd received a lot of compliments on his professional-looking basement finishing skills from all the various people who've been in our house during the last four weeks which was nice to hear considering all the blood, sweat, and tears (literally!) that have been poured into that space - especially in the last six months! So now we are on track to close next Tuesday and meanwhile are knee deep in packing boxes and piles of our stuff.

Here's a picture of the current state of our living room:

Our basement looks pretty much the same. For a family that purges on a regular basis, it seems like we still have too much stuff! How is that possible?

The next few weeks are going to be very busy and very bittersweet for us as we wrap up things here. Todd is leaving after work this Friday to move all our stuff to Lincoln, and then turning around and coming back Saturday so that he can be here for our last Sunday at The Summit (sniff!). Next week we close on Tuesday, Iris has her preschool Christmas program on Thursday, and we leave to move to Lincoln for good that Friday morning. And crammed into all the nooks and crannies as much as we can, there will be lots of goodbyes (temporary!) to people and places we love.

Along the same lines, the next few months are going to be some of the most stressful of our lives as we make this incredible life transformation into church planting. Nothing about our life is going to look the same which can be at times a very terrifying and overwhelming thought. We covet all the prayers we can get, so please, please pray for us! We would love to make it through this time without losing our minds and with our family still intact.

I'll try to post if anything changes, and I still want to post pictures of the house we'll be buying in Lincoln! I've been wary because I don't know if it's actually OK to post pictures of a house we don't technically own yet. We have a contract, but we're doing a special kind of loan in order to incorporate some of the repair costs into our loan, and we're still waiting for all that to get approved by the bank. We're super excited about this house and the neighborhood it's in, but you have to promise not to laugh when you see the pictures. I swear this house has major potential!