House Whirlwind

For those of you who don't know, the past couple of years have been crazy for us in the housing department. In November 2009 we were driving around a neighborhood near our house looking at lots for sale. Somewhat daydreaming. Then we stumbled upon a house that was for sale for an extremely good price for the neighborhood. It needed some work and some updating but we aren't afraid of that by any means. After much discussion we decided to purchase the house and remodel it. The lot/yard sold us on the house and the idea of more room was pretty fab also. So in November 2009, we bought and moved into this house:

On a nice sunny, breezy fall day in November 2010, my husband was out raking leaves with Rocko, Tabi was inside asleep, I was at work, and all the sudden Tabi came running out of the house yelling "Fire!" Sure enough, the house was on fire. Tommy ran in and started throwing out what he could but within just a short time we lost pretty much everything. The outside of the house didn't look bad but the inside was pretty much gutted. Culprit = wood burning fireplace. The whole experience was exhausting and emotional. Not quite what we had in mind for a remodel....

We were lucky enough to move into a condo right up the street while our new home was being built. When life gives you lemons, make lemonade right? We decided we might as well go ahead and build basically our dream house at this point. We know we don't want to move again, we wanted something we all would love, and we had a lot of visions in mind already. So we took off with it. In June 2011 our new home was complete and we were able to move in. That is the last two years of our house experiences in a nutshell. Consider this the abridged version. I could write for days on all of this. Our beautiful new home:

In between all of this going on my 17 year old sister moved in with us and we became her legal guardians, we bought our dog a month before buying the new house in 2009, I went away to rehab for a month, and a whole lot of other assorted events occurred.

We are thankful now to be living in our new home and enjoying a mostly normal, boring life. Life is life and things will happen but for the most part we just hang out at home and do our thing. And sing to our dog. Oh, did I mention we sing to our dog? It's true. We are nuts. Enjoy. HA