our new place

Here's what's been going on with us for the past month...

We bought a house! We closed on April 17th and have spent almost every waking minute since then making repairs, packing, cleaning, moving, unpacking, and doing more cleaning.

Two days before we closed we were informed that there were burst pipes in the house and quoted a large sum of money to have it repaired. Travis decided he was up for the challenge and wanted to fix it himself. We knew the leak was in the living room ceiling so we took our best guess and started cutting away. Travis ended up being a good guesser and we found three burst pipes all within a six foot line of each other. 

Then he decided to conquer a fear and learn how to weld. Its something he had always wanted to learn, but dealing with plumbing is scary. I guess there's nothing like a large plumber's bill knocking on your door to make you want to take a leap of faith. So he did some research and set to work. Thanks to his determination the leaks were fixed and the price was minimal.

After the plumbing ordeal was behind us we set to work on some cosmetic updates-lightswitches and painting the kid's rooms. 

Ethan got a nice shade of light gray

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Capri got a pretty shade of light pink

The next big thing was repairing the hole in the living room ceiling. We were lucky it was only one.

Travis patched it up and that's as far as we've gotten. The rest of the repair will come eventually, but for now it looks better than the gaping hole. While Travis was doing all this I spent a lot of time cleaning. The house was a rather large mess --dog hair and dirt everywhere. I did quite a bit, but there was still a lot to be done.

At this point we decided it was time to get our stuff in and do the rest of the work as needed. It turned out the cleaning we did beforehand wasn't going to cut it.

I had mopped the kitchen floor before we moved in and got the right side of this picture. It was ridiculous. So Travis ended up having to scrub each square by hand to get all the dirt up out of the cracks. We're talking hours of floor scrubbing. Travis is a saint.

We've made a lot of progress in the two weeks we've been moved in. Boxes are unpacked, bathrooms, kitchen, walls and doors have been scrubbed, and the basements been cleaned up, but there's still a lot of random junk that I need to find a home for. Hopefully, in the next week or two I'll have it all put together and I'll take some more pictures. For now, we'll end on something a little prettier-cute pics of the kids :)

My mother's day gift from Capri was that she let me put pigtails in her hair (and kept them in) for the first time ever. She looked so cute! (She's also obsessed with Frozen)

We're all loving our new place. The kids adjusted a lot better than I was anticipating, which has made the whole process so much easier. We've been really blessed this past month!