home sweet home

We took the house off the market at the beginning of October. Did I tell you all that? I'm not sure ... anyways, it just made sense not to worry about showing the house, packing, moving with the baby coming (i.e. me being huge worthless prego lady). Original plan was to put the house back on the market in the spring ... plan morphed into maybe we should refinance and just see how we feel in the spring (maybe summer/fall would be more realistic) ... and morphed again into lets just stay a while (5ish years, maybe more) and finish what we started around here.

See, we'd had a conversation back in April about everything we'd like to do to this house - from flooring and furniture to windows and knocking walls out - and decided that moving probably made more sense than doing all that work. So, we put the house on the market and for 5 months looked for something else and tried to sell ours. It's an adventure - the whole selling/buying a house thing - that's for sure. In the end after who knows how many showings and potential home viewings, we came to the conclusion that maybe we like our house more than we thought we did! It's funny, but I don't know how to describe it other than this: God simply removed every potential possibility for us to sell our house and buy a new one. We joked that all we had to do was look at a house and talk about putting in an offer and the house would sell immediately ... I'm not kidding! This had to have happened at least 5 times. We thought about charging for our services even :) We can sell your home in no time for a small fee!

So, we're staying. And it just feels right. Sure, we thought we were supposed to move and I don't have a good explanation for why in the world God would have wanted us to put our house on the market just to take it off 5 months later, but I've come to realize that I don't understand a lot of what God has going on!

And about finishing what we started. That's the rather comedic part and I'm so glad I see it that way. I mean, how boring would it have been to tackle the largest remodeling project we've ever attempted back in April? Doing it now, with less than 70 days until baby #2 arrives is much more fun :) I've always known I have a weird sense of "fun" and I guess this is just further confirmation! Doing it now has to be easier than waiting until next year when we have 2 little ones, right?

I will try to scan in some drawings of the floorplan changes we're making sometime soon. In short, we're dividing our huge 3rd bedroom into 2 new rooms (will make our house a 4 bedroom) and updating flooring in the main part of the house with laminate. But, if you've done any remodeling, you know that there's a lot more to it than that! We're not doing everything ourselves, but are doing plenty to keep up more than busy for the next several weeks.

What's been done so far:

• Scraped popcorn ceilings in entry, living, hall, and bedroom (that will be split into 2 rooms). I could write an entire blog post/rant on popcorn ceilings, but I will spare you ...
  
• Started trimming entry/living with primer during nap time today.
  
• Tonight my dad and Dominic took out the bookshelves that were in the big bedroom and cut the carpet back so the new wall can go in TOMORROW!
  

Yes, the wall is going up tomorrow. The plan prior to 7pm this evening was for it to go up on the 10th of November, but we got another bid and he wants to start tomorrow and we are eager to get started (well eager to be finished) so chaos will officially begin tomorrow night! Pictures to come ... and I'll try to keep blogging, but will walls to paint, baseboards to stain, etc, etc, etc I'm not sure when it's going to happen!