The Moving Saga
Our moving saga deserves a loooong post of it's own, but I will try to keep it as brief as possible!
After we found out we were pregnant in February 2016, but before it was even confirmed that it was twins, I felt strongly we should sell our cute little starter house. In early April we listed the house and to our surprise, it sold in 4 days for way more than we expected! For about a month I tried to get at least one box packed a day, but between being super pregnant and having two little helpers, it was quite challenging. We began to make plans for building a home in our favorite neighborhood about 2 miles away, but still in our ward boundaries. The design process was slow going (began in April and didn't finish until mid June) and with the house closing the first week in June, we began looking for a place to rent while we were building.
At this exact time, my brother Elijah (who works for the state department at the U.S. Embassy in Ankara, Turkey) was having serious concerns for the safety of his wife and 4 boys in Turkey. They were 6 months into their 2 year assignment and they began to look for a backup plan, just in case the family needed to be evacuated. As my sister in law, Marinda, has a sister in Enoch, they decided to buy a home on her sister's same street in the event that they would need to leave the country quickly and have a place to land. With the house in Enoch purchased and no evacuation in sight, Elijah called us and asked if we would be interested in renting their new home while we built our house. The timing seemed too serendipitous and with Elijah's new calling as the Branch President in Ankara for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, I felt certain God needed them in Turkey and we would be able to build our house and be out of their home before they would need to return to the U.S. The only problem was, the current family who had sold it to them wouldn't be moving until the end of June and we had to be out of our home at the start of June. Burke's parents were amazing and offered for us to live in their basement for a couple of weeks in Parowan in the interim.
THE DAY before we were supposed to close on the house, we were vacuuming out our storage room/laundry room (see above photos) and had it completely clean. Burke was turning off the light in there for the last time when he noticed a tiny little bubble in the ceiling above the washer area. He tapped it with his finger and WHOOSH! Part of the ceiling collapsed and a huge bubble of water burst all over. We had a bit of a freak out and realized that there was a mega slow leak coming down from the pipes connected to the dishwasher directly overhead in the kitchen and it must have been pooling there for months. It was a nightmare to try and get a plumber over to fix it (and make sure that was the only problem), drywaller/painter to patch it up and notify the buyer about it all the while trying to finish packing, moving and cleaning. Thankfully it all came together and I was grateful we found out about the leak and not our buyer, because I would have hated him to have problems later and to think we knew about it and didn't take care of it.
Goodbye wonderful Cottonwood house! We loved loved loved living here!
Move #1
On Monday, June 6th (our 7th anniversary - yeah!), we moved most of our things into a storage unit in Enoch. We were so grateful for all the Adams family who came to help, the Quintanillas and Robert Hugie who was an absolute animal with the dolly he brought along. Then on the 8th we were out for good and took our last two loads to Parowan. We lived in Parowan with Alan and Marie for 2 weeks and it was lovely to be their temporary guests, although it's always awful to be living out of a suitcase.
The girls saying goodbye to the yard and flowers. We really miss our tire swing, huge trees, and giant yard. This was such a beautiful spot for our first home and we have so many wonderful memories from our time there.
Move #2
On June 25th we undertook move #2 and relocated all of our stuff from Parowan and the storage unit to Elijah and Marinda's house in Enoch. This time we were very grateful to Burke's Elder's Quorum Presidency who canceled their meeting and instead came to help us. Blake Plumb, Jason Lister and Chad Schmidt knocked that move out of the park in a matter of 3 hours since everything was still boxed up from move #1. It meant so much to us that they would take the time away from their families to help us.
We lived in Elijah and Marinda's house for a whopping 2 weeks before we were sent to LA for the emergency laser surgery for the twins. Our world was in complete chaos with the babies, so I tried to make things seem more normal for the girls by unpacking the vast majority of our boxes and getting settled in. I hung picture, curtains, etc., and told them this would be our home for many months. I told them we wouldn't have to move again until we were in our new house and hoped that things could be wrapped up by Christmas time. I should have never given a specific timeline - big mistake!
Blurry shot of the front elevation of our house plans.
We finished our house plans in mid June and began to send out the plans to contractors immediately, however many of them were so flooded with work that they never even responded to our query for a bid and the rest took weeks to respond! By the time a few of the bids came back in July, we were in the thick of our problems with the babies and decided to table the house plans for the time being.
We had been back from the surgery in LA a for a grand total of 2 days when to our horror there was a military coupe in Turkey! My heart sunk as soon as we heard the news as I knew immediately that Elijah's family would be evacuated, which meant we would NOT be living in the house until at least Christmas like I had promised Daphne and would instead be moving AGAIN within a couple of weeks. On top of the anxiety over the babies, the stress of our housing situation was sending me through the roof!
We began house hunting immediately and went to about half a dozen homes with our realtor Donna Christensen, but none of the houses seemed right. I fell in love with one Tudor style house that was way out of our price range and probably looked through the pictures 20 times, sighing over how perfect it was, but just out of our reach. Burke mentioned our situation at his next Elder's Quorum meeting and Blake and Annalee Plumb approached us about possibly renting their home which just happened to be in the exact neighborhood (just around the corner in fact) where we had been planning on building.
They currently had the house on the market and I told Annalee that with 3 moves in one summer and all the stress we were currently under with the babies, the thought of moving into their home and having to move again if they sold it would drive me to the looney bin. She was understanding, but talked to her husband the next day and approached me with the suggestion that they could take the house off the market until the new year, giving us time to get the babies here safely and begin construction on our house. We were surprised at this generous offer and eagerly accepted, signing a contract that bound each of us to give the other 2 months notice before either Burke and I moved or they closed on the house with a buyer.
After finalizing plans with the Plumbs, I was so grateful that we would be out of Marinda's house just days before she and the boys arrived from Turkey. However, I must admit, I cried when I took down picture frames that I had unpacked and hung on the walls not even two weeks before.
Move #3
On Saturday, July 30, just 6 weeks after our first move, we moved from Elijah and Marinda's home to the Plumb's home. My parents, Burke's Dad and brothers Brett and Mike, 3 of Mike's Slack nephews, Kyle Torgerson and brother Rod Wray took several loads from one house to the other. I was completely useless by this time as I was still recovering from surgery and was under strict orders to not lift more than 10 lbs - not even my 22 month old! When the last box was dropped off I sighed in relief and told the girls - get comfortable ladies because I PROMISE, we are not moving until our new house is built! WHY DID I KEEP PROMISING THESE THINGS?!
Thank goodness for my mother. Over the next week she worked her hiney off cleaning every square inch of that house and got us completely settled in. I had about 10 boxes left over in a spare bedroom, but everything else was completely unpacked and set up. She managed to make the house feel like our home before heading back to Logan after 3 lovely weeks with her helping me to recover from the surgery and getting closer to the delivery of the babies.
If you've been following our "Journey with Twins" then you know that after an incredibly stressful month, we scheduled a c-section to take the twins at 32 weeks gestation, but on August 29, the day we went to take them, we discovered our son Aiden had passed away in utero. I remember thinking how grateful I was at that point that we weren't entrenched in building a new home at the time, so we could take time to grieve and wait for our surviving twin, Alan, to come on his own time.
As Burke came home from his meeting that Wednesday night, we were both still reeling from the unexpected loss of our son, when Blake Plumb called Burke out of the blue and informed him that he and Annalee wanted to put the house on the market again. Burke said he was in a state of disbelief as Blake explained that the next weekend would be the Parade of Homes and with a new house in the Parade just around the corner, that meant their best bet of getting a buyer for their home would come during all of the traffic during the event. He told Burke they wouldn't do it if we weren't okay with it, but made it clear that they would really like to put the house back up the following morning. When Burke got home, I was waiting for him in bed, feeling grateful that I had passed the time that night productively putting the house in order and not sitting in a corner weeping over our baby like I had been tempted to do for the past 2 hours. I remember my my feet were swollen, I had crazy bad acid reflux and I wondered for the millionth time how much longer I would have to endure the pains of this pregnancy.
See our "The Journey with Twins: The Aftermath" post to read about the anguish that followed when Burke informed me that despite our understanding that the house wouldn't be listed again until after the new year, we were about to be homeless for the 4th time in one summer. It was a dark moment in my life and the closest I have ever come to a panic attack/mental break down.
In the end, we accepted that the Plumbs needed to be able to move forward with their life as well, even if there timing was absolutely dreadful. The next day, the house was listed again and I wanted to throw up when the real estate agent showed up and hammered a "for sale" sign into the lawn. Every day I lived in fear that someone would call for a showing and I would have to hide my sorrows from prying eyes and heft my massively pregnant body around the house to tidy up for strangers to come and roam through the house that was supposed to be my refuge. But despite the frequent flow of traffic the Parade home induced, for 2 weeks, not a single person called and we were able to carry on as "normal" as possible until baby Alan was born 6 weeks premature on September 12.
Alan was in the NICU for 5 days and we were finally released from the hospital on September 17. Although I was trying to recover from the labor and subsequent c-section and feed our sweet new baby every 2 hours (they wanted him pumped full of food as frequently as possible since he was such a tiny preemie), we still had a funeral to plan and the next week on Friday, September 23 we buried baby Aiden.
Although this was an incredibly difficult time physically, mentally and emotionally, it was also joyful as we nurtured baby Alan. I know that the Lord played a part in preserving us from the discomfort and stress of potential buyers coming to view the house so we could have time to take care of Alan's birth and the memorial services. But as soon as the memorial ended - BOOM! We were back in the thick of it.
When Alan was just 2 weeks old, families began to schedule appointments to come see the house. Burke and my mother in law, Marie, were amazing and helped to keep the house "show ready" whenever we were notified of another appointment. Although they were as noninvasive as possible, it was still horrible to have to haul my aching body out of bed, wrap my newborn babe up in blankets and banish myself and the kids to the backyard while strangers and realtors walked through. I know they would have preferred for me to leave the house completely, but there was just no flippin way in my condition (I wasn't even supposed to drive for 6 weeks!) that was going to happen.
This awful situation went on for a few more weeks until October 8th (I know because I saved the voicemail!), when I got a voicemail from Annalee Plumb saying that we needed to talk as she and Blake had decided they would like to sale the house to us! I was in absolute disbelief and listened to the voicemail once more to make sure I had heard correctly. The house had originally been listed far above our range, but as the weeks had gone on, they had dropped the price steadily. Months earlier, we had joked that if they could come down to our top dollar (an embarrassingly low amount in comparison to what they were asking) then we would buy their house in a heartbeat. After all, we loved the house and it was in the exact neighborhood we had wanted to build in and would keep us in the same ward which we felt so deeply bonded with after all of the wonderful service and kindness on our family's behalf that year.
After talking with Burke, we conference called the Plumbs that night and negotiated. We were so grateful that they would take such a huge financial hit to sale the house to us, but we were also stressed that going up to our top dollar would make us "house poor" - so much money going into a house payment that we wouldn't have much to live on beyond that. However, after some discussion, we agreed we would sign a contract after we both did some homework.
This is turning into a marathon post. I could go into soooo much detail here, but I will just summarize by saying that there was a bit of back and forth over the next couple of weeks. A few days after our conversation with the Plumbs, we had crunched the numbers in several ways and worried that we wouldn't be able to make the house payment comfortably, so after much discussion, we decided to withdraw our offer. Enter 2 days of intense sorrow and darkness. I couldn't stop crying and felt sick to my stomach from sun up to sun down. We were a little dense and it took us a few days to realize this was the Spirit telling us that we were making the wrong choice. I had never had the Spirit withdrawn like that in my entire life and it was awful to feel so full of doubt and uncertainty. In that time THREE more families came to see the house and I bawled after each one, sure in the pit of my stomach that they would make an offer and we would be moving yet again.
Finally, Burke and I realized that our intense discord of feelings was the answer to our prayers and it was obvious we needed to reexamine our situation and make things work. After exploring a few more options, we found a solution that both Burke and I felt comfortable with and called the Plumbs to tell them we were back on if they would have us! They agreed, we signed a contract, got an appraisal and got our ducks in a row. What a ridiculous roller coaster!
In November, the week before Thanksgiving, we closed on the house (those months were such a blur, I didn't document much of anything and I can't even remember what day). It was such a tremendous relief! We parted on good terms with the Plumbs and have been so grateful to be here. And thus ends the mega moving saga of 2016. If I ever have to move again in this life it will be too soon!
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