Homeless no More - praise the Lord!!!

Shew! We now have a home! The Lord gave us an absolutely AWESOME house - yes, I said HOUSE!! Not an apartment - wonderful! Also, since our church is in a pretty nice area, we had pretty much resigned ourselves to the fact that in order to be close to church, we'd have to go w/a 2 bedroom in order to find something in our price range. Miraculously, we found a THREE BEDROOM house with a huuuuuuuuuuuge yard and tons and tons of storage in our price range!! Granted, it was at the tippy top of our price range, but when we went to sign the lease papers, our landlord told us, that he and his wife had decided to drop the rent to lower than what they originally told us! Can you believe that?!?! We hadn't even asked if they'd be willing to take less - we were just so thankful to find something so wonderful that was w/in the price range. God is so good to us!

The last couple of weeks we have gone about furnishing our house. The only furniture we had was a dining room table (no chairs), a mattress and box springs for the master bedroom, and a bed for each of the kids (though no mattresses for them). We had pretty much gotten rid of everything when we moved out of our apartment back in January, because we had decided to use Michael's signing bonus to treat ourselves to some new furniture. (Something we've never had in 9+ yrs of marriage!) Over the last couple of weeks, we've hit Craigslist and yardsales, and gotten some AWESOME stuff!! I'm telling you - the stuff we have found may as well be brand new, and we've gotten it for a FRACTION of the cost! I am just amazed at the wonderful deals the Lord has dropped in our laps! I tallied up everything - figured out how much it would have cost to buy everything we have brand new from the furniture store - it came up to just under $6000 - we have spent only $675!!! We have a beeeeeeautiful armoire entertainment center (the kind that has doors you can close, which is what I've always wanted!), a beige microfiber dual reclining love seat, a beige microfiber couch, a burgundy rocker recliner (something else I've always wanted and never had before!), an antique desk that we are using for a computer desk, as well as two freestanding islands and a very nice solid wood (heavy!) toy chest for Jared's room! I'll try to take pics in the next couple of days and post them!

So that has been our lives the last couple of weeks. I finally got Jared's school stuff ordered, and it all came in yesterday, so we will be starting school on Monday! Not too bad - just about a week behind when I wanted to start, so I'm pretty pleased w/that.