Weekly Update

Um...I have nothing complete to report on.  It's been a truly frustrating week of running a lot of errands and accomplishing next to nothing...at least that's what I thought for the other five days of this week while I complained and cried about how long everything takes to finish and sounded a whole lot like a 5-year-old.  


But this morning, as I walked around this house, that will in a few hours be filled with my family, I thought about how amazing it is that we are as settled as we already are considering that we really haven't been here very long.  I'm pretty sure it took a heck of a lot longer to get settled into the other houses we've moved into in the past.  

So, fortunately for you, you missed all the complaining and crying because I deleted all those posts, and I'm just going to skip to the part where I stop being a spoiled brat and start being grateful for what I have and for what we've done this week.  

1.  The kids are registered for school!  


They don't have schedules yet.  That will be yet another step we'll have to complete next week, but they are officially registered in both the high school and the middle school.  Hallelujah...it's been a long and tedious process and I'm so grateful the hard part is over.

2.  This enormous project has been started...  

Here's where we got the inspiration...

That's the three story Tower of Faces in the Holocaust Museum.  It is incredibly solemn and reverent.  I don't think ours will have quite that feeling, but we are planning to fill the entire wall from floor to ceiling.  Currently, we're at the part where the tall ladder is too tall and the short ladder is too short, so we'll have to solve that tiny problem before we can continue.  But we've made progress, and that's a good thing.  


3.  We have a front door that is more inviting than it was last week.  

I have a friend in Allen who had a massive initialed doormat on her front porch and I loved it, so she sent me the link to the website so I could buy my own for this house.  Because this porch is oversized and therefore needed an oversized doormat, they were super expensive!  I really didn't want to pay $124 for something people were just going to wipe their feet on.  So I kept looking.  Birmingham happens to have a boatload of bargain/thrift stores and I happened to find one that gets the overstocked doormats from that very company I was going to order from.  If you're willing to dig through a bunch of W's and Z's, you can save a ton of money!  
wreath...Kohls clearance $12
doormat...Southeastern Salvage $22

4.  More thrift store treasures.
Half the reason this furnishing and finishing process is taking so long is because I want what I want, but I don't want to pay full price for it.  The thought of buying furniture from an actual furniture store makes me cringe a little bit inside.  It definitely takes a lot more hunting, a lot more patience, and a little more creativity to be a bargain hunter.  But then when those treasures appear, holy cow! is it the most fulfilling thing ever.  I found a cute thrift store near the church the other day and bought this perfect little table for the basement guest room for $14.  

5.  Things are growing.
I planted these three little herb jars and put them on my windowsill because I saw it on Pinterest.  And guess what!  This morning, I saw baby basil sprouting up in there!  

So, while each room may not look exactly the way I've envisioned them in my head and while there may still be lots of projects to complete, there's also a lot of progress happening.  And where we are is complete enough to have the cute sister missionaries over once a week, and a few out of town visitors drop in every now and then, and my family come from Scottsboro to have dinner with us.

And I'm pretty sure this perfect little baby cousin of mine didn't care one bit that the gallery wall isn't finished or that only 33% of my little plants are showing signs of life.