2340 Oak Street

Tonight is our last night here at 2340 Oak Street.

We will load a moving truck in the morning and move a few miles north to our new home! As much as I have wanted to move, (and am so excited for the new house) I know, I will miss this little house. This house was the 5th place we've lived in our almost 7 years of marriage and will definitely be the hardest to leave (we have lived in a lot of places!). I think it's hard to leave because we owned it. It was our "first house" and we put a lot of "blood sweat and tears" into it.  We brought our babies home to it. We've made this little 2 bedroom 1 bathroom place work for us. And it's been great! 

Here are some of the things I will miss and won't miss so much...

-I will miss the fact that you can stand pretty much anywhere in the house and see the whole house (that's actually a perk when you have small children;)

-I (think I) will miss the huge back yard and deck. (I won't however miss the 2+ hours it takes Russ to mow the lawn every Saturday in the summer)

-I'm sure I will miss only cleaning one bathroom, ha!

-We will miss the "loop". Blake will no longer be able to run circles around the house hahaha. 

-I've always wanted carpet in a house, but now that we are moving to a house with mostly all carpet I'm sure I will miss hardwood. 

Somethings I won't miss...

-Only having one bathroom... we are gaining 1.5 bathrooms... that's 2 whole toilets more (can you hear the excitement in my voice?!)! Like I said, not too excited to clean all those toilets but it will be so nice to have more then 1 toilet!

-Doing the laundry in the garage... I cannot wait to actually have a laundry room and to do full size loads of laundry!! (our washer drained into a basin sink and could only hold so much water)

-One car garage... it'll be great to be able to get both cars in the garage!

-The neighborhood... this could be a whole post on it's own... but just to give you an idea.. Within the first few months of living here, someone late at night knock on the door asked if we had "a smoke" he could have... Um no. This should have been our first clue, ha! We have had things stollen of the car twice. The whole neighborhood was tagged, including our car (thankfully it washed off). We've witnessed police pulling a guy over with guns drawn yelling for the man to get out of his car with his hands up, which then ended in the man being arrested (this took place literally in our front yard). And Russ has had to call the police on a domestic dispute. It's been quite an experience living here. We like to refer to it as "The Hood".  I can not wait to be in a better more family friendly neighborhood and actually getting to know our neighbors!

We will miss this little house, it's been great and we've made many great memories here. But we are so excited to be moving and feel beyond blessed to be moving into a brand new house! 

Sale Pending!

Back in the end of January we put our house on the market. We bought our house three years ago, when the first-time home buyers credit was available. We bought our 1950s two bedroom bungalow pre-kids. We bought it knowing that it wouldn't be our forever home but our first home, a stepping stone. Now that we have two kids we feel like we have outgrown it a bit. So once we hit that three year mark (with the first-time home buyers credit we could not sell until we had lived here for 3 years or we would have to pay the $8,000 credit back, um, no thank you) we were chomping at the bit to put it up for sale!

After almost three months on the market, we accepted an offer! It sure felt a lot longer then three months though. Trying to keep the house picked up at all times with two kids, (and one who is like a little tornado and makes a mess wherever he goes) incase someone wanted to come see it, was quite the chore!

Once we had an accepted offer things seem to happen really quickly. We had to find a house quick or we were going to be homeless in 30 days... yikes! We had been looking, knowing that once we had an accepted offer we were going to need to find something quick. But of course the house we had fell in love with sold. We knew that we really wanted to be in North Albany or Corvallis. We quickly learned that we could get way more for our money in Albany then Corvallis. We also knew that there were two new developments going up in North Albany and building/buying a new house would be a possibility. We spent an evening looking at some older homes in the South Albany area but we kept going back to the new homes in North Albany. For us it was hard to look at older homes knowing we could buy a brand new home for the same price (never in our wildest dreams did we think we could afford a brand new home!). A couple Sunday afternoons ago we walked through a new house in a new neighborhood in North Albany called Benton Woods and found our new home! That Tuesday we put an offer on and it was accepted!

If everything goes as planned we will close on our current house on May 31st and our new house on June 12th. I'm sure your thinking "where are you going to live for the 2ish weeks in between?!" We've asked the people buying our house if they are ok with us renting back for 2 weeks and they are! So we'll be able to stay here until we can get into the new place! Its crazy how fast things seemed to fall into place once we had an accepted offer.

Can't believe we will be moving here in less then a month!

Praise the LORD!!!

We have water again! I have so much cleaning/laundry/dishes to do I don't even know where to start. But I've never been happier to have that problem!

Going almost 5 days with out water was not fun. You don't realize how much you use WATER. EVERY. DAY. This experience has really taught me not to take water for granted anymore. I think of all those people that don't have water or have to walk miles just to get water. It makes me want to do something to help these people. We are so lucky to live in a country that has clean water and plumbing and toilets that flush. And to go to a restaurant and drink water (for FREE) that we know is clean. We are so BLESSED!

So today when I go turn that faucet on to take a shower/do the dishes/wash my hands or even when I flush the toilet I will say a prayer of thanks, to God for the the blessings in my life, even clean water and I will pray that somehow I can help those who need water.

I know it's not Christmas time but I thought of this video after going through all this. Watch it. It's powerful. Even not at Christmastime, it's powerful.

Oh Monday.

I forgot to mention in the last post that we were still able to turn the water on in the morning to shower and fill up buckets and water bottles to have water throughout the day. Sunday and Monday morning we were able to shower at home. Tuesday morning we weren't, here's what happened Monday....

Monday morning I woke up hopeful that before the day was over we would have running water again, um not so much. Not only did we not have water our house smelled...

Monday morning Russ went to get Blake out of bed and thought he smelled natural gas in his room. I couldn't really smell it and thought maybe it was the dirty cloth diapers that haven't been been washed in 4 days. I moved the diapers into the garage and we went on about our morning. Around 9am I went to lay Blake down and I noticed the smell. I called Russ at work and he called NW Natural Gas. The gas company was here by 10am. The guy checked all our gas lines and determined that everything was in good working order and there was no leak. He thought we possibly had a dead rodent rotting under our house and that was what we were smelling. We kept the heat at a minimum and closed the vent in Blake's room and the smell somewhat went away. Today (praise the Lord!) it's pretty much gone. But it grosses me out to think of something rotting under our house, YUCK!!

Now (Monday morning) our house stinks like a rotting rodent and we have no water... fun!

Back to the broken pipe....

Around noon the Plummer showed up (is plummer suppose to be capitalized? it says I'm spelling it wrong if it's not capitalized, electrician doesn't have to be capitalized. So why plummer, if someone knows, please explain:) (sorry for the tangent). He got to working and by 2 was finished. He knocked at the door to tell me he was done and I said "so we have water now?!" he said "no" :( I wanted to start crying. He explained that since our pipes were so old that as he was putting on the new pipe he made a leak in the main pipe that brings the water into the house (this wasn't his fault, we were warned this could happen). This meant now we couldn't turn the water on AT ALL. So I wrote him a big fat check for what felt like nothing (although he did replace a pipe and he did work for 2 hours).

The plummer left. We got some quotes from other plummers (ridiculously expensive quotes, now I wanted to start crying even more). One of the options was to dig the trench ourselves and then the plummer (the same one who was here before) would come replace the rusted out 60+ year old pipe. This was by far the most affordable option. We talked to our friends who graciously offered to come dig the trench for us.

Brandon was here this morning at 8:30am and Drew came around noon and Russ was off by 2 and the trench was dug by 4:30!! We are so grateful and appreciative of these guys to do this for us! Such a blessing!

The plummer will be here tomorrow morning to lay the new pipe. I hope and pray that we have water tomorrow afternoon and that nothing else goes wrong.

Here are some pictures of the trench...

The start

Yay! I see pipe!

 They had to dig under the sidewalk

 and under the house

Thank you Brandon and Drew for helping us out! We appreciate it so much!

A broken pipe and a garage sale

Wow, what a weekend/Monday it has been. I'm not even sure where to start. Today has definitely been "one" of those Monday's. I guess I will start from the beginning...

Friday was a beautiful spring day here. The sun was shining and it actually warmed up into the 60s which was so nice for a change! My friend Megan and I had been planning on having a garage sale Saturday so she came over in the late afternoon to help set up for it. Russ was off work a little early and made it home in time to get the yard mowed which was much needed considering our front yard was beginning to look like a jungle. While Russ was mowing the lawn he notice an unusual puddle next to the side walk by our main waterline. When he saw the puddle he was pretty sure we had a leak but since the daylight was coming to an end he didn't want to do anything about right away. 

That evening he called his parents and told them about the assumed leak. Don and Pam were going to meet Russ halfway to give him Raven (another long story, they have had her for the last week) on Saturday. Once Don heard we might have a leak they decided to just come all the way up to help figure things out. Friday night had pizza from Papa Murphy's (if you haven't had the Herb Chicken Mediterranean deLITE you must try it, it is so good!) After we ate pizza we tried out the new frozen yogurt place in town. It was really good!

Saturday we woke up bright and early to get the garage sale going. Don and Pam arrived around 10:30.

While the garage sale was happening the guys worked on trying to figure out if there was a leak. They went back and forth probably four times, is there a leak, is there not a leak. At first they thought it was just ground water (since it has rained so much) and our water bill actually went down last month. But then they would turn the water on but have no water running in the house and the meter would still spin. So they I mean Don kept digging.

 And digging

(Thank you Don for your hard work!)

And Don found the leak. You can't really tell but there is a leak.

The leak wasn't horrible. Russ and Don tried to put a temporary patch on it but that didn't work. But since the leak was somewhat minor we were able to turn the water main on and off. 

 We filled up some pots and buckets. We were still able to flush the toilet.

Back to the garage sale... 

 Blake and Megan

We were so thankful the sun was shining!

Megan's mom, Teresa, even joined us for the garage sale. I would say it was a success! I went from having about 7-8 totes full of stuff to now only 2! I love the feeling of cleaning things out and getting rid of things and its even better when you make a little money off of things you don't need anymore! It was great to have Pam here to help with Blake. Thanks Pam!

Sunday we didn't do a whole lot. We tired to do some yard work but with no water that was harder then you would think. I did start working on this... 

Before...

After...

Hopefully I can get it sanded and maybe stained by this summer. It would not only make it look better but then Blake could touch it and not get splinters. (This is all the further I got on Sunday)

Oh and this is how I found Blake after his afternoon nap on Sunday...

Even with the sleep sack on, he was so proud of himself!

Therefore we dropped his crib down. I now almost have to stand on my tiptoes to lay him down.

 He is growing up too fast.

This post turned out longer then I thought (and its now almost 10:30 and I'm tired) so check back tomorrow to hear about Monday... just so you know we still don't have water and it's even worse now... we can't even turn it on till its fixed or there would probably be a geyser in our front yard...

Bathroom redo and other happenings form the week

Before:

Taking everything out

After:

I love my new sink! 

Thank you Pam and Grandpa Wright, you did a great job!!

The bathroom is so small it is hard to get a good picture.

Other Happenings from the week:

Grandma Z was hard at work pulling weeds! Thank you for all your hard work!!

Next summer I hope to plant tomatoes, cucumbers, zucchini, lettuce and maybe some carrots in this area!

Tearing off the old boards

Putting on new ones!

The boys and their floppy hats. Blake still has a little growing to do till his hat fits well!

The snake we found on the front porch. I don't think he liked all the disturbing we did to his habitat.

We know how to fill a dumpster!

Russell reading Blake his first book; Curious George Goes Fishing!

Blake laying on the quilt Great Grandma Z made for him!

The little guy is all worn out at the end of the day!

The roof is almost finished! It's been too hot to work on it in the afternoon. So they work on it for about 5 hours in the morning and then a couple hours in the evening. Tomorrow morning they should be able to finish it up! 

Now its time to go eat some homemade peach pie with homemade ice cream, YUM!!

The roof is off!

Today with the help of (many of) our friends the roof came off! Here are some pictures of the day:

The house before the work began

The HUGE dumpster that will be full by the time its picked up on Tuesday

And its coming off!

Look at those hard working men!

Grandma Z working on our never ending weeds

Benny and Raven have become quite good friends

BBQ-ing for all the hard workers!

It's off!!

Some of the hard working men (missing; Drew, Greg, Don and Grandpa Jerry)

Tomorrow's projects:

-Put on shingles

-Paint bathroom

-Install vanity in bathroom! 

Thank you EVERYONE for all the hard work you did in the heat today! We really appreciate it!

House Projects

Tomorrow the fun begins! We are putting a new roof on the house!! Russell's parents and grandparents are here this week to help do a bunch of house projects! 

Here is the list we are going to try to accomplish:

-roof

-kitchen sink facet

-paint bathroom

-bathroom fan

-install bathroom vanity

-sprinkler system

That is the list so far, I am sure other things will be added to it before the week is over. 

Grandma Z and Jerry came from Arizona to help and they drove their motorhome and have parked it in our back yard. Yes, that is a motorhome in our backyard, I had no idea our yard was that big! Its fun because it kind feels like camping. We just need a campfire, and some s'mores!

It is going to be a busy week at our house, I hope to blog about it each night with an update and pictures! 

On a side note, Blake had 2 milestones; He intentionally smiled at my dad (this past week when we were in Medford) and he slept 6 hours last night!!! 6 continuous hours of sleep never felt better! I'm not holding my breath though because I am sure every night won't be like that, just yet.