Forever House #8

...our journey to rent free living, all the entertainment minus the headaches.

We were supposed to be in this house before the boys' birthday (mid October), but so is life. Then it was before Christmas. Now I hope it is before our little girl gets here in March. A couple days ago we found out that some very dear friends decided to give us $2,000 to help finish our house sooner. Wow! People give sacrificially to our ministry all the time and it is always a blessing because they believe in what God has given us to do here. When someone gives you something personally it is a little bit different, really it is overwhelming. We are just so thankful and really touched that someone would want to do that. This will help us be able to hire more workers to finish our home sooner!

It is so exciting to have our own yard! Jimmy has been moving a lot of our potted plants over to our land and planting them in the ground. The most important plants to me were my Jom trees. I planted them from seeds back around Thanksgiving '08 when our first baby would have been due. They are sort of my memory trees. It may sound silly, but they are very sentimental to me. I had 4, but 2 didn't survive in pots. 2 were moved to our land which I thought was fitting, since we now have 2 little ones to meet in Heaven. This is what the larger one looked like about 2 days after the move:

Almost all of its leaves had fallen off. I was very worried. But this is what it looks like now:

It survived, along with the other one! Our coffee plant from Huehue that we have had since January '07 made it too!

I didn't realize we had so many potted plants. Our yard doesn't look bare anymore.

Jimmy scattered them all over our yard. I wanted it to look natural, like a tidy jungle!

We also had a man down the street offer us some plants he dug up out of the jungle. This is what the average Guatemalan does. Only upper class folks and silly gringos actually buy stuff from a nursery! (We do it all the time.) We hope to replant some things from the KBI land soon too.

We ordered St Augustine grass plugs several months ago. It was supposed to be done before the boys' birthday so that they could play on their new swing set without traipsing through mud... but that's not how things work around here.

This is what it looked like after they finished planting the little plugs:

This is what it looked like 2 weeks later:

It is filling in quickly. This is one job that came in significantly lower than its original estimate, so that was nice! It has been planted along the sides of our house and the backyard. We are waiting until more of the construction is completed before we do the front yard.

All of the razor wire has been completed along the top of our wall. Remember there is broken glass cemented along the top of the wall as well. We have been broken into more than once, so we hope this will be a deterrent.

Jimmy spent a lot of time cementing down a travertine path from our storage room in the back (which will eventually be a wood shop) to our back porch. We will have a couple of these paths around our yard.

One of our construction workers was helping him mix concrete. Jimmy got him started filling in between the stones and along the edges. Jimmy was using boards so that it would look neat.

Jimmy left and the worker decided to just slap on the concrete to get the job done faster. He covered up a lot of the stones and quit using boards along the side. We came back the next day and it looked horrible!!!! It made me sick to look at, since Jimmy had spent to much time on it. I didn't take a photo because I was disgusted. You can see part of it in the bottom corner of the second grass photo above. So frustrating when you have to be there 24/7 to make sure people are taking pride in their work. So now the worker has to go back and break up the sides and use a wire brush to uncover the stones he concreted over. Jimmy decided to give him one more chance. I don't want anyone trying to provide for their family to lose their job, but I don't like paying them to fix the job they didn't do right the first time. We have other workers who do take pride in their work. Wish they were all like that.

Another update of our creepy hallway that leads to our master bedroom!

Here is an "oops" we found. Our architect changed the the width of the outside door that goes to our carport... the door where we will be carrying armfuls of things like groceries through. We didn't realize it on the plans and then we walked passed it the other day. It is .75 meters, which is a little less than 2.5 feet. The column is already there, but we are going to have to fix this somehow. Not a big deal, but a time eater.

This is our master bedroom. That door leads to our bathroom. This is the side of the house that will get the roof first. We have two roof lines and this is the smaller one. It is a little taller now than this picture... "almost ready for the roof"! (I hear that every day.)

This is the back of our house. The large windows are our master bedroom. One will look out onto the porch and the other to our backyard. I hope we won't have to run our window unit as often at night since we will have large windows we can open.

These are our roofing panels, just chilling on our back porch... waiting... and waiting, hoping to one day be installed.

One thing we will not be waiting before we can move in is power. We have it! This is the main breaker for or entire house. We put in another request for 220 so hopefully that means we will eventually have our own transformer. We have a lot of brown outs right now at our rental house and have to turn off everything to use our shower head water heater. We don't want to have the same types of problems. (My ivy is doing so good!)

We were dreading the end of November coming and honestly were planing on moving into the side of our house that will have a roof first since our lease agreement was up. I know the owners of our rental are ready to move into their home... I can completely relate to that! We had been looking around San Pancho trying to find a temporary rental. The thought of moving a couple months before you have to move again is just yucky, but there were no other options. The owner came over Tuesday evening. She hadn't seen the inside of her house in over 2 years. I really thought she was going to tell us this was it, we had to be out. But... it turns out that her husband was in an accident and out of work. (This is very sad and I truly wish it was not the case. He will heal, no permanent injuries, but still sad.) Right now she needs money more than her house back. Jimmy offered her a little bit more rent money and we can stay for 3 more months!! This was a specific answer to prayer.

CRAZY ITEM OF THE DAY:

A bird flew into our house right before the owner got there, so the whole time we are talking about being able to stay longer there is this bird flying around our heads. It would follow us from room to room. At one point he got stuck in between the light and the ceiling and started to panic. He ended up being inside our house for about 3 hours. We weren't sure how to get him out. I was afraid a broom would hurt him.

He was a very active little guy. He would sort of dive bomb Jimmy and the boys. Jonah and Silas would duck and giggle. It was great entertainment. Finally we turned off all the lights and Jimmy held a lantern on the porch. He flew towards the light and left. It was fun while it lasted. He was really a beautiful bird.