Moving and All That Craziness

We moved, did you know?

We got to meet the buyers of our Parkrose house, something I was really hoping for and yet knew is not always common practice these days.  But we met them and they are the sweetest people; we even exchanged contact information.  I hope they invite us over sometime.  If not, at least we're friends with enough of our old neighbors that we can go hang out with them and spy on the new people.  Nothing creepy about that.

Tuesday afternoon we had to drop a few things off to the new people (garage keys and a smoke alarm that all accidentally got packed).  They weren't home, and would you believe that they had all the blinds drawn tightly shut?  Didn't they know how desperately I wanted to do some peaking into their windows?  Don't be shy, folks.  Leave those blinds open.

Daphne understands why we moved and knows Mr Speck is building us a new house soon.  She's been fine with the move, although she thinks our rental is really tiny and she likes our old house better.  Christian still asks to go home to mommy's house.  He's all done with our friend's house, he says.  Poor kid.  I'm hoping that once we're all unpacked and feeling more settled he'll be OK.

Those 2 weeks of moving and closing on the old house were, well, awful.  I've never sold a house before and never moved a family.  Selling sounds so 'simple,' but I guess nothing could prepare us for the emotional and physical stress that comes from that undertaking.  I remember a friend recently being so stressed out while selling his house and I couldn't understand why...I don't think it's understandable until you're in the middle of it. I would go to bed at night sick to my stomach about how we were going to handle the next morning, and feed the kids lunch with a sick stomach about how we were going to handle the afternoon, and then go to bed with a sick stomach about the next morning; it was a lovely cycle. 

It's made us so thankful that we have such utter confidence in where we will end up.  All this work and stress would not be worth moving into an 'OK' house, since we're moving because we want to and not because we have to.  There were houses we really liked that were maybe on smaller lots, or didn't have a front porch like I really wanted, or a formal dining room (I have a thing for formal dining rooms) or a master bathroom.  We would think the house had enough things that we did like that we could overlook the things we were disappointed about, but now that we've experienced this selling process I am just so thankful that God kept us from those other places, even though it was a disappointment at the time.

And now, in our little house on our tiny lot, where I can look out my bedroom window and see at least 13 other houses within plain sight (for reals, I counted), we get to look forward to the 'fun' part of this whole process.  Don't mind my crazy pinning on Pinterest...we are more than ready for this next part of planning our new house.