Yesterday was Father's Day. The hubs and I are really terrible at relaxing. Like really terrible. However, Father's Day is one of the days every year that we are able to really let ourselves sit down and enjoy our families. Matthew is such a hard worker. He has a full time job, farms, mows seven yards every week, and is still an amazing husband, dad, son, grandson, and friend.
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Sometimes you can't go back to sleep after tucking the three-year-old back into bed at 4:45 a.m.
So you decide to do some online window shopping on Hobby Lobby's website. Sometimes you accidentally put some items in your cart. And enter your shipping information. And your payment information. Sometimes your online window shopping turns into actual online shopping. Oops. I had a plan. I was going to do a thing. I was going to BUILD MY OWN FARMHOUSE TABLE for the new house. Seriously. I had pinned all kinds of plans. I had measured and sketched and figured. I had called and priced lumber. I was ready. I was going to build a farmhouse table for like $175. Amazing. And then, I thought I would just check and make sure I couldn't find one for that price online. I checked all over the Internet and NOPE, turns out $175 is the best price for the masterpiece I had planned! And then...Craiglist. I hopped onto Craiglist last weekend just to do a little browsing of any farmhouse tables that might have been around the Greater KC area in the last few months. Just looking for some ideas...some inspiration. That's when I found it.
She has a specific order that you are to go in to make the system work and she promises that for those people who have gone through her entire program, she has seen no rebounds. Once I started this method, I was hooked. It became an obsession for me last summer and I flew through the decluttering and organizing tasks associated with several categories. Clothes. Papers. Books. Kitchen Items. Bathroom Items. Toys. I was really making good progress. Near the end of the summer, I was nearing the end of my KonMari journey. I still had a few categories left to go through. Holiday decor. Electronics. Teaching supplies. Sentimental items. And I stalled. Right there in the first week of August, with the items sorted and ready to be tackled, I stalled. I just left the sentimental items piled in a box, put the holiday decor back into the garage, put the tub of electronics into a cabinet in the laundry room, and took the teaching supplies back to my classroom storage closet. I had made amazing progress and when I started working at school again, I just lost the momentum to continue! The house stayed clean and organized for the first few months of school, but once we hit second and third quarter, I started losing control. Again. I rebounded. Sure, we didn't own as many items as we did prior to my first KonMari round, and we were more careful about our purchases now, but still...it was just a little unfinished. Fast-forward to this last spring. Our buyers contacted us and we began to make plans to move. I was still exhausted by the end of the school year and unfortunately didn't have it in me to start another KonMari round before school got out. In dealing with the house sale and purchase hiccups and trying to get the closing all worked out, I haven't even had a chance to start yet. But guess what? It's coming. I'll be starting my second round of KonMari this next week while we still have two weeks in the current house.
Everything was moving along so smoothly with our house sale and our house purchase. Until last week. We had originally planned on closing on both and sale and purchase on June 16th. We had started to pack our life away into tubs and had started putting less-used furniture into a large enclosed trailer in our driveway. And then we got a phone call about about the possibility that the closing date was actually July 1st. With further investigation, that seemed to be the closing date on several pieces of paperwork making this whole process work out. In the meantime, we were notified of several loose ends that needed to be tied up to make sure that things could progress as they needed to. Somewhere along the line, someone neglected to order an appraisal of our current home. There were a few issues on the title work of our house that needed to be cleaned up. Our buyers needed to make some repairs to their current home and their appraiser needed to come back out and inspect their work. And then...hail. That's a quarter between those three softball-sized pieces of hail.
On May 27th, in the midst of our preparation to close, we had a huge hail storm that tore up our current property. We need four new roofs...the house, the detached garage, and both of our big barns. We need some new shutters, new fascia, and new gutters. So really, the delay that I was frustrated about to start with has been kind of helpful. We are waiting on the official report from the adjuster and then we will get to work making these repairs. So June 30th, it is. Two. More. Weeks. Almost eleven years. We purchased this house in September of 2006, when we were expecting our first child. There have been so many memories made here. We brought all three of the girls home to this house. The two older girls started school in this house. We have redecorated and remodeled, gardened and added new structures. We've had a tornado blow through, a few grass fires in the field behind us that came pretty close to the house, and roof damage that required a replacement. We have grown and changed. We've had days of joy and sorrow, good times and rough times. For almost eleven years. It will be hard to say goodbye to this house. We'll be closing on the new house in a few short weeks.
We are looking forward to the memories to be made at the farmhouse, but also excited for the couple who will be purchasing our current home. Our stories line up pretty perfectly. We've known these "kids" for several years and we've always joked with them about how their relationship has really mirrored ours. They were high school sweethearts. They got married young. We share a lot of the same hobbies and our tastes in decor are very similar. So when they contacted us with aspirations to purchase our house, we felt very "at peace" about the whole situation. We decided to pray about it and look at the budget, as we discussed all the possibilities of where we might end up. One possibility was my parents' house, staying in their basement. With three kids. And three dogs. And cows. And chickens. We also talked about buying some land and building a house, but there was the issue of going from a house with three nice big established outbuildings to a property with none. For most of the land we were looking at, we would have to fork out about as much as we will be spending on the farmhouse for the land alone. And we would still have the expense of a house and shop added on top of that. Plus, we have really loved taking this old house we live in now and loving on it to make it our own. The thought of starting with something brand new just didn't really feel like "us" at this point in our lives. We both love the character of older homes, so we were trying to build that character into our house plans which can get pretty costly. So when I was sitting at Claire's softball practice one night and my sister-in-law mentioned her neighbors getting ready to put their house on the market, my heart leapt and a smile began to form on the corners of my lips. After practice, the girls and I drove out there and we fell in love. That's when the dreaming began. The "Bungalow" Pinterest board was created. I started sketching ideas of how to divide up the pasture and yard. I emailed the realtor and set up a showing. I began praying that if this was the house for us, that God would work it out. And He did. In a big way. But that's a story for another day. ❤️ |
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