A lot has happened since I last blogged seven months ago. Soon after I wrote the last post Brian and I began talking about the idea of moving. William and John were struggling in the high pressure environment at VHS and we had some other concerns with the girls growing up in the community. The Lord had been so good to us in our time in Steiner and brought us so many dear friends ago help us out during some difficult times. We were also stretched to step into leadership roles in church. Even so, we’ve always felt that Steiner was not where we’d live out our days. It was just a stopping point. We had a ten year plan with the idea to reevaluate once John graduated. Here we are seven years in and starting to wonder if God was having us make a change sooner than expected.
I have a hobby of looking at old homes for sale in Texas and dreaming about what we could do if we owned one. Brian and I enjoy staying in bed and breakfasts and every time we stay in one we look at each other and say “we could do that!” It’s been a little dream of ours for a long time to one day run a b & b or an event venue. Last year I saw a place in Smithville that looked perfect: a large home with five bedrooms and 5 1/2 bathrooms and a separate building with another bedroom and a shop as well as ample attic storage space above the shop. The old house had been moderately updated, at least more than most houses of its age - a hundred sixty years old. The price was high and we weren’t thinking of moving and Smithville was too far for Brian to commute from every day. So I slammed my laptop shut and forgot about it.
So in April Brian has been working from home for a month, the kids have been sitting at home waiting for the school to begin dispensing assignments. Even Margaret is home doing online college classes. My nannying job that I’d been holding since August has been suspended due to Covid and we’re all getting a little more than stir crazy at home in our house in a neighborhood full of Karens. Brian and I began to wonder if we should jump ship earlier than we’d planned. Real estate in our neighborhood is hotter than ever and we’re seeing houses on our street selling for much more than we ever dreamed. One morning out on a run together Brian mentioned he’d been thinking we may want to look into moving sooner than later. As soon as he said it I felt a sense of relief. As much as we’d been blessed in our years of living in this beautiful neighborhood, in many ways it was like a pressure cooker for us. We could never keep up with the Joneses though the pressure and standard was ever present.
Brian and I both started searching. We knew what we wanted: we’d always dreamed of fixing up an old house, preferably in a small town. Many of the close in towns had been discovered since we’d last looked and we had sticker shock. But also at the same time we began to realize that our home was worth quite a bit more than we’d been thinking and homes were continuing to turn over quickly despite the pandemic. One day a large house popped up that was at the top end of our price range. It looked familiar and as I scrolled through the photos I realized that it was the same one I’d shown Brian a year or so before. Why was it on the market again, or still?? The price had dropped considerably since I’d seen it before and although it was still expensive I determined to take a look at it.
A week or so later Margaret and the girls and I went to visit some friends out in the country and as we were leaving I told them there was a house I wanted to look at. We drove over to Smithville and found the place. Things are always different than how they appear in real estate listings, and the house both impressed and disappointed me. But no denying I was intrigued. Margaret almost immediately said, “Y’all need to buy it! Do it!”
I came home and sheepishly told Brian that we’d gone to look at a place and showed it to him. He spent the next week eyeing the lot and surrounding area on google maps and scrolling through the photos. He made an appointment for us to go look at it the next week.
It was cold, wet, and gloomy the day we drove out. Brian thought the house was interesting but wasn’t sure about the location. It was set on a hill away from the historic downtown and there were some unsightly houses around it. The house itself also had some oddities. We went home a little deflated.
But I kept feeling that this house was to be ours. I couldn’t quite explain it. It just seemed like God had been keeping it for us for the last year and a half to two years. We made a few more visits out to view the house before we contracted with a realtor. God began opening so many doors for us from this point on that I am still amazed when I look back. We kept praying through the whole process that if it wasn’t to be God would show us clearly. Instead it seemed that He kept saying “yes”.
We listed our house May 22, William’s 18th birthday, and had a ridiculous number of showings (20+?) and five offers in the first weekend. We closed on the Smithville house right after Independence Day and moved in the next week. It has been a whirlwind of activity since. We painted most of the interior, we replaced a large window in the girls’ room. We removed carpet on the stairs and in the girls’ room and replaced it with wood-look tile. We replaced bathroom fixtures and toilet parts. We repainted all the exterior lights and metal work flat black (the previous owners had painted everything silver). We planted five pallets of grass. We gutted and remodeled the kitchen. We hung new lights throughout the house. John got a new door. We fenced the whole property with a privacy fence and picket fence. We began stripping the old paint off the porches. We had some trees removed and we put in a pool. It’s hard to believe that we accomplished so much since July.
God has brought so many new friends into our life that we already feel more connected in this small town than we did after seven years in the other place. We miss our old friends and many things about our old home but it has been made abundantly clear to us that this is where we are supposed to be right now.
I could say much more, but that’s the basic (unedited or proofread) story of how we got here.
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