We’re On the Move…

We’ve owned our house for less than two weeks now, and we’re boxing up the last of our belongings and moving everything there in the next week or so. This will make the third place we’ve lived within a year.

And as much as I hate moving and packing and unpacking, I’m so thrilled because it will be the last time for quite awhile (hopefully!) that we’ll have to go through this process. Now rearranging furniture and repainting walls will have to suffice, and I’m quite okay with that!

MOVING AND MISHAPS
The funny thing is that we weren’t really expecting to move this soon. While the lease on our current apartment states that we only need give 30 days to cancel, our landlord informed us that the notice had to be given on the 1st of the month…and we were calling her on November 9th. Which meant that we were going to have to rent it for the month of December as well.

But we got to thinking and, more importantly, praying. We decided to see if we could find someone to move into our apartment early, so that we wouldn’t have to pay for all of December. (Because heavens knows we could put that money to good use elsewhere!)

With a couple of ads posted on Craigslist, I started packing up our belongings, trusting that the peace I felt in my heart about the situation was encouragement to trust that something would work out.

Within about a week, I got an email from a woman interested in seeing our place. As it turns out, her workplace is only blocks away and so she was thrilled with the location. And of course, the cheap rent doesn’t hurt either!

ANOTHER ANSWERED PRAYER

The holidays through a wrench in things and we hadn't heard anything in some time, so I was beginning to wonder if it really would work out. But then, today, my landlord called and told me that the woman decided to rent the apartment and is planning on moving in mid-December, which will give us time to do a little painting in the house before moving but still help keep a couple extra hundred dollars in our pockets. Perfect timing, right? Which of course happens to be exactly what I had been praying for when we started praying for a replacement tenant.

You know, when I prayed that I would be “pleasantly surprised” with this whole house thing, I really was not asking for much. I just wanted everything to be okay, to be liveable, to not be a burden or cause financial ruin. Yet every aspect of this process—from inspecting the house and negotiating for updates to finding someone to move into our apartment—has proved to be above and beyond what I imagined possible. I asked for the bare minimum, and instead I have been showered with rich abundance every step of the way.

It has been breathtaking to say the least. Pleasantly surprised doesn’t even begin to describe it!

And so I sit here, with cardboard boxes scattered around, the walls of our apartment blank and bare once again. I can barely believe all this is actually happening. But it is, and for that, I am in complete and utter awe.

TAKING A BREAK FOR THE HOLIDAYS

So, with this hasty move and all the settling in that comes with it (plus a holiday or two mixed in), I’ve decided to take a break during December from posting new content. Instead, I’ll be sharing some of my favorite posts from the archives that I’ve written over the past two years.

If you’ve been following for very long, I hope that you enjoy getting to re-read many of these posts. And if you’re new to Life Blessons, I hope that this little trip down memory lane will be an enjoyable one for you.

I’ll be spending the extra time unpacking and painting and dreaming up creative ways to turn this house into a home. And then in January I’ll be back with a fresh line-up of new posts, plenty of updates and a brand new series to kick the new year off. Happiest of holidays, friends.

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A Sneak Peek at Our New House

Now that we have closed on our new house (you can read the story of our process purchasing it here) and have started packing boxes and picking out paint colors, I thought you might enjoy a little sneak peek at our humble little abode.

These photos are from the walk-through we did when the previous owners' were still living there (so all the stuff you see is theirs), but they give you a good idea of what caught our eye when we saw the house and why we are so excited to make it our own!















(Yeah, those trees are our backyard. It's like our own personal nature preserve!)

We have a growing list of things we'd like to do to the house, so I can't wait to share those updates and personal touches as we make them! Look for those in the coming months.

For now, I hope that you are all staying warm and cozy with friends and family this Thanksgiving season!

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The Story of Buying Our House (Part 2)

Continued from yesterday's post. (Please click here to read Part 1: The Story of Buying Our House)

Not only were we surprised to find that we actually liked this house, but it also happened to be the cheapest one we’d looked at yet.

It wasn't anything fancy, but we weren't expecting anything like that anyway. It was a humble ranch starter-home—which we quickly deemed "the log cabin"—that had recently been renovated, updated with all new appliances and furnace. The backyard was filled with a tower of trees that made me feel like I was in the midst of a nature preserve rather than the heart of suburbia.

It all seemed too good to be true, it seemed like there was no way it could actually come together. In the past, we had always been outbid or days too late in coming to the table. Even so, we waited a week before making an offer.

As the days ticked by, I started worrying, What if we missed our chance?! But I quickly caught myself and remembered that God is not consigned to time. If this was the right home for us, the timing would all work out. We needn’t rush into anything in haste. We could trust that God—who cares about our souls and hearts but also, so graciously, even about the littlest things in our lives, like buying a home—would be able to overcome even those circumstances.

We were shocked when they came back and accepted our offer. Even our stipulation that they cover all closing costs and throw in the fancy fridge in the kitchen.

That had never happened before.

So for the first time, we found ourselves in uncharted territory, calling up inspectors, making negotiations and letting the concept sink in: We are buying a house!

As the idea of purchasing this home—for what seemed too good to be true—started to sink in during those first days, so did something else. Anxiety started to worm its way in, twisting and contorting the beautiful possibility that lay before me: What if the house ends up falling apart in a year? What if everything needs to be replaced? What if…?

I soberly recognized that in those thoughts, I was expecting God to pull the rug out from beneath me. That something this good couldn’t be. There had to be a catch somewhere.

But then the Holy Spirit countered and reminded me: That is not the way God works.

And so, I prayed, Lord, let me be pleasantly surprised. Let this house not be something that ends up crushing us under the weight of misfortune. But let it be something that is just one more reminder of His gracious love and mercy, to provide a perfectly good home to his children—no strings or smashing anvils attached.

We walked cautiously into the series of inspections, waiting with bated breath for the results. Each time we were, in fact, pleasantly surprised with the findings. Sure, with a house built in the 1970s, there were plenty of minor fixes and updates that were recommended. But nothing disastrous. Nothing like what I'd feared.

I admit that I was astonished at how God was answering that prayer of mine to be "pleasantly surprised." And as I watched and waited, the anxieties began to melt away as we inched closer and closer to the reality that this would in fact become our home.

We signed the final documents last Friday and are already in the midst of packing up boxes and picking out paint colors as we turn this little homestead into our own.

I can’t wait to show you this home-sweet-home of ours. Until then, we stand in awe at how God's love has been written all over this journey of ours, how he has taken something as simple and as ordinary as buying a house and has used it to remind us of his unfailing love and mercies.

And right in time for Thanksgiving, no less. What timing. We have so much to be grateful for...

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The Story of Buying Our House (Part 1)

I mentioned before that this buying of our new home—our first home—came about rather suddenly.

The truth is, we weren’t really looking for a house. Last winter, we were seriously shopping, seriously looking for a house to call home. After countless abodes and a couple of rejected offers, we decided to take a break from the house-hunting and move to an apartment instead.

Rent at this apartment was cheaper, but it was filled with its fair share of peeks into the challenges of home ownership, what with leaking roofs, broken appliances, infiltrating ant armies. Even then, I wondered if this season of apartment dwelling might be preparing us for the day when we might have a home of our own.

Even though we hadn’t looked at a house in months, I kept praying that God would prepare a “humble but sturdy” home for us. I prayed in faith.

Then, out of the blue, my husband told me that there was a house nearby that I might like. Evidently, he’d made it a habit to keep an eye out for homes for us, to keep poking around even though we weren’t actively looking. It’s insights like that that make me cherish this husband of mine all the more—that indeed he is always looking out for me, for my interests, for my future. Even when I have no idea.

He called me to his computer, and I looked at the quaint little Cape Cod. It seemed too good to be true. We phoned our previous agent and asked about the house. It ended up that it was a short sale that was already under contract, but then our agent pulled together some similar houses to show us.

We were back to looking, even though we didn’t really expect anything to come of it.

We went and looked at a handful of houses, but nothing caught our eye. We went out again, and as we made our way from one house to the next, they started feeling like one of them might actually work. We got to the last house and walked away surprised that there wasn’t anything major about it that we didn’t like, like there had been with every other house.

In fact, we actually did like it.

Not just in a well-you-have-to-compromise sort of way. Not just in a well-if-we-rip-this-up-and-change-that sort of way like all the other homes we'd looked at had been.

It seemed as though that little prayer for a "humble but sturdy home," uttered on the couch months before, was actually coming true...

Click here to read Part 2: The Story of Buying Our House.

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A Prayer for a “Humble but Sturdy” Home

I was sitting on the couch in my living room, in the house that we currently rent. We moved here to cut down on my husband’s commute time to work and because the rent was quite a bit cheaper.

And yet, since we’ve moved, we’ve discovered a trail of things of housekeeping-gone-wrong, which I’ve shared before and before.

I suppose you come to expect that when you’re living the renting lifestyle, where landlords don’t want to put in the money for quality upkeep because they expect you not to take care of it yourself. We’ve done our best to fix up the place as best we can and make it livable with some loving DIY ourselves, involving quite a bit of duck tape.

And we’re content with it, knowing that right now it is a good place for us because the rent is cheap and we're in a good neighborhood. But it also makes us aware of all the things we don’t want in a home whenever we do decide to buy a house someday.

While I don’t know when that time frame will be, I know at some point we do want to be able to buy a home. And because of that, it is something that I’ve been praying about since the hunt first began and continue to keep praying about even now, while the house-hunt is on hiatus.

So it was that from the cushion of my living room couch, I prayed, once again, for that someday house of ours: “I just want a humble, sturdy home! Nothing big and fancy, nothing that will crown us the Joneses. Just a home that we can settle into, that—sure, will have its fair share fixing-up to do—but without all the duct-taped headaches that have plagued us in our few months here."

And as I prayed that, I realized that it’s not just true for the home we plan someday to buy, but also for my own daily life: I want to have a humble, sturdy life. I don’t want to vie for fame or riches. I just want a life that is lived with purpose, a life where I can find contentment. Most of all, a life that has a sturdy foundation built on the Rock.

I smiled at the thought of all that God is teaching me in this little, ramshackle-of-sorts apartment. Without a doubt, I get annoyed every time something goes wrong, but the Lord always opens my eyes to some sort of silver lining that comes through, whether it’s a wake-up call about what home-ownership is like or heart issues that run deep, paving the way to what is sure to be a humble, sturdy life, after all.

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Getting a Little Taste of Home Ownership

A couple of months ago, I mentioned that my husband and I started to consider looking at buying a house. We ended up deciding to stick with renting for a little while longer, so that when the time comes, we're able to have more time to look as well as a better idea of what we're in the market for.

One thing I didn't expect that would come with renting for a little while longer was that we've already started to get a little taste of what home ownership might be like.

As soon as we moved into our humble abode, we discovered that the sprayer in the kitchen sink was dripping water into the cabinets below. We called our landlord and she had someone come and replace the sprayer. Then we discovered the bathroom sink pipe was dripping; another phone call and another replacement.

Next came the clogging of the kitchen sink. After I spent an hour or so plunging and trying a vinegar-and-baking-soda home remedy, a plumber had to come out to unclog the rust-filled pipes. Then we saw that our fridge would periodically spit out ice-cold water onto our kitchen floor and the inside of our fridge.

The latest discovery has been that our dryer no longer tumbles.

All within less than one month of moving in!

Fortunately, our landlord has been pretty on-top of getting most of the things fixed, but the dryer was something we had to take care of because it was left by previous tenants and not provided by the landlord. We knew this when we first moved in, so once we discovered the problem to our damp clothes, we started doing some research and figured out that the cause was likely a broken dryer belt.

A lot of the information we read online said that this was a fix we could do ourselves. And with the part costing about $20, versus calling a repairman out for around $200, we decided to try the DIY fix first and call in the professionals if all else failed.

This past weekend, after an early-morning hike in the sunshine, my husband and I stopped by the appliance parts shop to pick up the dryer belt. We watched a how-to video on the Home Depot website, and then decided to roll up our sleeves and dive in.

Within half an hour, my husband had the belt on and the dryer running better than ever! Marking our first home improvement project together, outside of piecing together IKEA furniture. A little taste of home ownership, one day at a time.

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The Search for a Home

Originally, we had been planning that we’d be moving right around this time. We wanted to find a place to live closer to my husband’s work and thought we’d already have all the details nailed down right now. However, a couple of weeks into the search process and we realized something: There’s a chance we might try to buy a house!

It really came out of nowhere and surprised even me because I didn’t think it was really possible right now. But when we started looking, we saw that with a little TLC, it could really become a reality.

Because of that, we have extended our lease at our current apartment for another month, while we troll more houses and contemplate putting offers on the ones we feel make a good fit.

We’ve only been looking for a couple of weeks, and already I’ve realized how overwhelming this process can be, how consuming it can be with the thought of finding the “perfect” home.

When we first started looking at homes, I got pretty excited, thinking that this could become our future home. With barely even an offer on the table, I caught myself daydreaming about all the accessorizing and decorating and crafting that might be. I caught myself starting to worry about the disheveled décor that I’d seen and wondering how in the world I could fix them up. I started researching ideas and possibilities, scouting out modern rugs for the living room, pretty knobs for the kitchen cabinets, paint swatches for the bathroom walls.

And I caught myself as I was swept up in the moment of “maybe” and letting it overwhelm me, when we didn’t even know if this house would become ours. (Not surprisingly, it didn’t.)

As we search for a possible home, I want to be careful to make sure not to waste my energies fretting over surface details like these when they’re not even yet a reality. I have to remind myself that a house is more than how it looks and how it could look if only a little bit of this and that.

As they say, “Home is where the heart is.”

Whether we find that in a house with our name on it or another rented apartment where squirrels invade, I want to find contentment there—not in what might be.

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