The Yoder Family Moves

My wife beaming and happily painting our hallway.

 

 Mid-July we finally closed on the house we'd been interested in and a good riddance to the whole home buying process. We spent almost half a year preparing to find a house and a year saving up like fiends for a big down payment. After taking the fast and crazy route, I would recommend the slow and steady route to anyone buying a house. Houses haunted my dreams. In July we emerged from the battle victorious, me a little wired with bags under my eyes and Stephanie breathing hard from hauling the rest of our family around.

We closed on a Friday and we had one week to get everything done before moving day. We bought a foreclosure. Though move-in ready, the list of things to do was pretty lengthy. So we went to work doing everything we didn't want to do with furniture in there. Priority number one was painting. Steph put the colors together and even did a decent amount of painting. Her current condition however limited her physical stamina. So we relied heavily on our gracious cousins Jimmy and Tasha to give us some much needed man power.

Rooms painted, my next priority was to get the water heater running. It is a tank less one by Bosch and at the time of purchase it was not working. I downloaded the instruction manual and figured out how to run the thing and fired it up. We now had hot water at all the taps. "Problem solved" I thought to myself. Then I tried to take a shower. From the tub faucet, the hot water flows at a trickle compared to the blast of the cold water. Should you choose to shower, your options are hot water with the cold water tap off or let the cold water overwhelm the hot water. There is no in between. I chose a hot shower. The searing pain of the near boiling water would not last long, because three minutes into my shower the hot water pressure began to decrease. Two minutes later, I was huddled under the feeble dribbles sputtering from the shower head trying to rinse the shampoo from my hair and eyes without scalding my corneas. Honestly, it was one of the most invigorating showers I've ever taken and I was ready to go! Steph on the on ther hand, discouraged by my painful utterances, was not in the mood to be awoken that rudely and decided she would forgo showering for as long as possible. Currently, the water temperature in the shower is something we are still in the process of fixing.

Hot showers or no, the move-in day still came a week later. I can't express how blessed Stephanie and I felt with all the friends and family that came to help us move. We alone, could not do it. Steph is forbidden from lifting anything heavier than her Tervis Tumbler and I am not capable of single handedly moving a solid oak roll top desk. We had everything moved out of the apartment and hauled to the house by noon. The Yoder and Nobis mothers prepared us an amazing lunch, so we had a quick break and enjoyed the company around us. Thanks to everyone's help and the White's giant trailer, we were all moved in by two.

Living in a house is divine! So quiet, no sirens, trains, or Mexican hat dance music. And I finally have the outdoor and garage space to go nuts with all the stuff I wan to do. At night, I crouch down in our backyard, listen to the crickets and enjoy the quiet beauty that surrounds me. My delight in our new abode is slightly checked however by the fact that this place is not really mine. The Lord has given us a piece of land and a house to live in. Should He require us to be somewhere different, He will give it all to someone else and we will happily move along. Daily, I remind myself to prioritize my life in this order: God, Family, everything else. Our house does not fall into the first two categories and so I must not hold too tightly to it. In the end, the will of God outweighs my desire for a quiet peaceful home to live in. None-the-less, I think I can allow myself to take a little bit of pleasure in it all and bask in the glow of being a homeowner.