Our Place

When we moved to Iowa, we lived in a hotel for about 75 days. Being homeless is an awful feeling. We felt like we were stuck in Limbo! It's difficult to move on in LIFE when you don't have a permanent address. You can't forward your mail, you can't get a driver's license, you can't register your cars...bleh. When we were finally able to buy another duplex, there was an extreme sense of relief! 

Good-bye hotel room.

Hello house!
(This was taken in March when we moved in)

Before we moved in, we decided that the duplex needed new paint all around and padding placed under the carpet. The week prior to our move we spent a lot of late nights prepping our future home. A couple of ladies from my ward came and helped me paint and Bill sacrificed his knees to re-stretch our carpet.

Our bedroom before...

Our bedroom while painting.

Our bedroom as of today!

Bathroom before...

Bathroom while painting.

Bathroom as of today!

Painting was a messy business.

He was exhausted just thinking about the idea of carpet-kicking.

Kickin' Carpet

We moved into our place on March 26, the Saturday before Easter. A lot of people from our ward were there to lend us a hand. Let me emphasize the mantra many hands make light work! It only took two hours in total to move everything from our storage unit into a U-Haul and from the U-Haul into our place. We are so grateful to those good people! I can't even imagine the amount of time it would have taken if it were just Bill and I doing the work.

I cleaned out Bill's Trailblazer as I moved our stuff
out of our hotel room. Um...is this normal?

My planties are making a comeback!
I made sure they were strapped in tight for the move!

Thank you Wardies for helping us move!

Returning the U-Haul after unloading. Bill loved how big and old it was.
Driving makes this man seriously happy.

While Bill was at work I was able to spend a lot of time unpacking and deep-cleaning every room. It was so nice to feel settled and at-home so quickly! And I actually hung things on my walls! This is the most homey place we've ever lived, although it would still be considered apartment-living. We have two bedrooms, one bathroom, and a washer and dryer (at last! - although it is in our kitchen). But we lack a dishwasher again. Our place is really good for two adults and maybe a small child and a small dog. But whenever we have extra adults over, it begins to feel really cramped. It's a good thing we live far from civilization where we rarely have visitors. Haha. 

The second bedroom...it's home to everything else.

Living room.

The piano in my garage will go right here - as soon as it's refinished.
Hopefully that will happen sooner than later!

The wall separating the kitchen
from the living room

The kitchen.

Where I sit as I write this blog post.

Dishes are the wooorrrrrsssstttt.

And for the first time in forever, we have a two-car garage. We couldn't park in it initially, but after a couple of days of rearranging in the heat while listening to the beautiful sounds of drunk neighbors and loud mariachi music, we were finally able to protect our cars from giant falling walnuts and bird poop. 

This is how it was for months

We finally found the motivation to start cleaning

And now we can park our cars!

I love being able to mow our lawn and weed our flower beds. It's a lot of work, but I feel so fulfilled doing things like that! My goal is to have a really nice green lawn next year - one where I can walk outside in my bare-feet if I really wanted to (I actually hate being barefoot)...which means a lot of prep work for this year and learning how to properly apply fertilizers and weed control and such. And it's been really fun to see what flowers and plants blossom in my yard - lots of neat surprises!

Weeding my yard is fun to do, fun to do, to do, to do!

Cleaning the gutters. A giant black sock was plugging one of the downspouts.
How did it even get up there?

These lilies were amazing when all in bloom.

We have A LOT of spiders and several varieties of ants that torment us daily, but with pest control sprays and powders, we've been able to regain our sanity. And the orb spiders that build their webs in our doorway are the absolute worst!

These yellow-sac spiders haunted us in every ceiling corner
in every room prior to spraying  Home Defense all over our house.

Although I am still bitter about how Iowa goes about their recycling, I have succumbed and try to do my part. I take my recyclables to the self-sort center in town and make a concerted effort to make sure the lid on my garbage can closes all the way (we get in trouble otherwise!).

Taking my recyclables to be recycled

West Liberty Self-Sort Recycle Center

Saturday nights are really happening when the races are underway. We live right next to the West Liberty Raceway and county fairgrounds. The races can be quite loud, but not usually any louder than our refrigerator! Often times we just end up being out of town so we rarely have to deal with the noise. We've been hit with a triple-threat in the past; once the races were going on, the backyard neighbors were having a giant birthday celebration with a live band and bounce house, and the neighbors across the street were celebrating with family. That was exciting. Even better was when the missionaries came over for a visit while a lot of that was going on! 

We are still working to renovate the other side of the duplex, so no one lives there at the moment. But that has been an adventure in and of itself - finding lots of weird old things and wiping who-knows-what off the walls. But we'll have everything in order eventually. 

Everything found in the crawlspace on the other side of the duplex.

That's our place in a nutshell! It keeps us dry from the torrential rain and cool from the intense humidity. We like where we live! It's not our dream home, but every time we move, we're one step closer to being there. But I'm grateful for what I have and the freedoms and joys it ultimately brings to my LIFE right now.

So much rain. You don't need a sprinkler system out here.