We moved! (Before pictures)

These first pictures are of the guest house. I think it will be awhile before we do any fixing up here.

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These pictures are of the playroom - we also haven't done much here.

We moved back to Chandler and now live just one street away from my parents' house. Also, Javier is 7 minutes from work instead of 40minutes and we are more in the center of ministry that we wanted to be involved in. In this post I will show you before pictures of the house. Later I will show you how it looks now. The location, size, garage, lot size and price were all great - but it had a lot of cosmetic issues, tons of plumbing problems and a trashy yard. It has only been 5 weeks, so it is still a work in progress and I am sure we will be working on projects for at least a couple of years. We rented out our other house to a really nice family - so that was a huge blessing too.

After - or should I say the house "so far"

This is an older custom home on an acre with no HOA. This is the neighborhood where I grew up. The people that built this house, converted 2 of the 3 car garage into another living area/kitchenette that we use as the play room and can eventually use for bedrooms. Then they added on a 3 car garage with 5 storage rooms, a bathroom/laundry room for the pool and a guest house above that. The guest house has been used by different friends the whole time. Our hope is to keep it filled with friends, missionaries that are back on furlow and to host international students and hopefully even Ephrem, our son in Ethiopia.

So far cosmetically, we had a guy come refinish the cabinets and one of Javier's friends put in the granite. We have a painter friend who did all of the painting, which I think made the biggest difference. My dad put up all the window coverings, new mirrors and light fixtures and Javier and Jordan have taken out at least 30 cactus and tons of dead plants and weeds.

As you can see, we still need some appliances, fix and refinish bathroom cabinets, paint the laundry room, play room and guest house and work on the yard. Oh we have a couple of broken windows and the boys' shower upstairs still leaks - but little by little we will get this old house in shape :) and hopefully it will be used to bless others and God willing it will be filled with children, grandchildren and memories for years to come.

NASCAR at PIR- 2/26/2011

Friday afternoon, one of Javi's vendors with work gave him 3 suite tickets to NASCAR. We didn't really want to go - but the big kids begged us. Julia gave up her spot to Jordan - since it was her turn to go to something special - so I thought that was really sweet. Javi had been gone to NY for 4 days and then his boss was in town which means, he was not around at all, all week. We had several sick and I have been sick and had a migraine Friday. I really couldn't handle taking care of the little ones another day with no help, so Javi urged me to go with the big kids - so that is what we ended up doing. We enjoyed all the free food and drinks, freebie cars, hats and headsets with radios that allowed us to tune into the different cars/drivers and their chiefs. That was awesome and we made some great memories. Thanks Daddy for working so hard and sharing your perks with us.

Joshua - 3 months - fat and happy