2010 Miracles~

As 2010 came to an end, I could not help but reflect on the past 12 months. I had so many great hidden miracles in the past 12 months I cannot help but be humbled. I would have to say my biggest miracle was the transformation of our house. You see for a few years I have HATED my home. Every time I would drive up to our home I would just cringe....
Earlier this year I was watching Oprah (love her) and she said a something like "Your house should rise up to meet you." I broke down into tears and kept shaking my head yes..it should.

Let's start from the beginning of the year. January 1st, 2010 we woke up in the morning at 4 am from a knock on the door our neighbor told us "you are not going to like this but there is a ton of water in your front yard". When my husband and I looked out the window we could see water pretty much on our entire lawn.

oh snap... A water main pipe had broke.

Thankfully it was the City's pipe and did not cost us a dime to fix it. What a relief!!!! I was so thankful, because I knew this was a sign that 2010 was going to be a Great year.

Due to the water main break part of our bushes were dug out....

I made the worker men some cinnamon rolls and BEGGED them to please dig out the rest of the bushes. They replied sorry there is not room in the dumpster or else we would. After they left I was wishing I would have just said I will take care of the ones that don't fit in the dumpster, so for 5 months we had a big empty spot in our parking strip of bushes. (not cool)

My house was SURE not rising up to meet me.

Over Memorial Day weekend we were able to dig up the rest of the bushes from the parking strip. About 2 weeks after we had pulled up the bushes our City did a "clean sweep" to our entire neighborhood giving out citations for lots of code violations like for too many weeds, no numbers on your house etc. Well we got a nice little notice stating we needed to put something in our parking strip not just dirt, we needed house numbers on the house and....we needed to paint or put new siding on our house. wow WHAT? Paint our house? it was a shock. I mean I knew that our house needed to be painted sooner than later...but painting a house cost money...money we just really did not have at this time. I was in such shock, mainly because I did not know that a City had a "right" to tell us if our house needed to be painted and if we did not then fines would start adding up.

(our house is ALL wood, in 2009 we had an estimate for vinyl siding...that estimate was $25,000.00, then we got an estimate to paint the house which was $12,000.00 due to all the labor that it was going to take, sanding, priming and then painting...this was why I was in such shock. We had some money that we had saved to do some "home repairs" So we opted for getting the roof done and finishing a bathroom (this will be another post) the outside of our home was again pushed down on our to do list)

When I called the Citation worker to verify if this was really what the citation said. He asked for our address so he could pull up his notes. When he realized what house was mine he asked "oh, is your house the purple house?" I said yes, then he said "mam your house looks awful!"

umm yay I know.

So we had our little conversation that resulted in tears from me. I asked him if we could have a one year extension because at this time we could not really afford to paint our house. He politely said No, we had 30 days but if he saw that we were making progress he would give us another 30 days. As I was talking to him and crying....I had an Aha moment, why am I crying? we have wanted/needed our home to painted for some time this will just make us figure it out sooner than later.

more to come tomorrow.......................................................................................................

xoxo Lizzie~