On the Move

We are about to move...AGAIN. There...I said it. yes, moving. Didn't we just move?? Yes, but that was one year ago. We are renting our home....ever hear of a ONE YEAR lease? Yup..that is what we had...yup..that time is up again. Do we want to renew our lease??? HECK NO! Do we like our house...well..it's DEFINETLY not what we wanted in a house like we thought when we found it last July. I actually hesitated to write this post. I could have wrote this post a month or more ago. But chose not to. I didn't want to hear it. I didn't feel like explaining our whole move to everyone. Sometimes I feel like I have to explain everything to everyone (that's why I love blogging...saying it one time for all to read!)Nothing against anyone who makes comments to me about moving. I know it's hard to "get it" when you don't live in my home on a day to day basis and hear our conversations about how we are trying to find that perfect place to "plant our roots". and just when we thought we found that place (bella vista, AR...we still miss that place and our church family and friends there..that truly is our "home"..when someone asks where we are from..I don't hesitate to say Arkansas)we had to move due to lack of a job--kind of a necessity when you have 4 kids to feed. We had to move to where the work was.(long story short..Ryan went back to being an insurance adjuster) Now that we have the whole job thing straightened out we need to just find that perfect place in Tennessee to plant our roots. TN is a big place and Ryan basically works the whole state (well, from Nashville all the way to the Eastern side of the state) so we could really live anywhere. And it just takes some time to find that perfect place. Does that make sense? His job is different than most where he has the flexibilty to work from any place here since he works from home.
Last year we moved out of our temporary rental house (if you recall..we had moved here from Texas due to my husbands job and the move was rather quick so we just found a short term rental house until we could figure out the exact area we wanted to find something more permanent)Our temp house was out in the country. We LOVED living out in the country. But since the house was for sale and we knew we could not buy it, we had to move when our lease was up. We decided to try living back in town. In the suburbs. TWO weeks after we moved, we KNEW this living was not for us. We hated everything about living in a subdivision. No offense to my neighbors, but MAN I very much dislike having neighbors. I dislike looking out my front window. I can see house after house after house. I dislike hearing garage doors open (and they aren't even loud..but I can hear them). I dislike having to hush my kids while playing outside early on a Saturday morning. I could go on and on but I will just leave it at we belong in the country. My children are COMPLETELY different children when we take them out to the country. They get along, they are creative in their play, they roam around and just enjoy being outdoors. They appear to be in their element. I love watching them play when they are out of the "city". I know it sounds crazy but there is a definite difference. And I like what I see.

About 4 months ago...we started trying to figure out what we would do when our lease was up. We knew that we could not stay here, living here for another year would be TOO much. Our main reasons being: we want to be in the country, the house is WAY too small for our larger than average family. (since we live in here, do school in here and Ryan does his work from here, we need space--more than we realized). Also, Ryan was staying out in Eastern TN at least one night a week sometimes two since a majority of his work is out that way. So the only thing that made sense was to move. We LOVE eastern TN. And decided we would move a few hours in that direction.

Once we knew we would move the next step was to hopefully find something that suited us. Nothing was popping out. Nothing seemed to be what we were looking for. We had lots of needs and wants in our next home. Plus we had our 2 hr distance from potential homes against us. (it's hard to find a rental and set up a time to look at it before someone else snags it). Well, Ryan found an ad about a certain area that had acre lots. He called it to just find out about the area. The realtor said she had a rental available but it was a two bedroom. Okay, that will DEFINETLY not work. Then she said she had a 3 bedroom on a 4 acre lot that will be up for rent at the end of June. We said that is actually the time we will need to move. SO she gave us the details and told us where it was and said we could drive by and if we were interested she would set up a time for us to look at it. The house wasn't even up for rent yet so we did not have other people trying to look at it before us. Ryan was out there the next week and drove by. AMAZING is all I have to say. Country...DEFINETLY country. It's on 4 acres. Mostly wooded but some cleared up by the house. BAM!..it meets critera #1. The house is 2400 sq foot.(ours right now is 1500). BAM! meets critera #2. We havent' even seen the inside yet. So we set up a time and went to see it. BAM! Critera #3...it has SO much room. I was SHOCKED...when you see if from the outside, it looks smaller. After we looked at it she asked us if we wanted it. I knew for SURE I wanted it. It wasn't a fancy house but it met everything we required. And actually it has a whole area for a homeschooling area, which will be WONDERFUL! Since it has 2 living rooms, one will be used as a school/play room. Oh and can I add that I can not WAIT to do laundry! The house has a HUGE laundry room. Probably 4 times the size of mine now. I have grumbled about my laundry room for almost a year now so that excites me. :) So back to the realtor asking us if we wanted it. We said we did. She said, okay, it's yours. Heres the application. I won't show it to anyone else. If you change your mind let me know but if not it's yours. I couldn't believe it. We found everything we could want in a house, we didn't have to stress about finding one. It kind of found us actually. Amazing. Well, it was God I know for sure who brought it to us. I'm so greatful. That was 2 months ago. How amazing to not have to stress about where we will live.

So now the moving details. We were going to move July 1st but it will be ready for us June 23rd. Since July 1st is Jordan's birthday we decided to move June 23rd so we will be at least moved before his birthday so we can celebrate his birthday rather than be moving. I couldn't be more excited. We plan on this being our home until we can buy our own. (yes, I've said that before but sometimes for reasons it makes sense to move--one of the pros to renting..being able to just pick up and move without having to mess with selling a house!)

The kids are very excited to move. We have already found a very active homeschooling group there, We have found a church home already (we went there one Sunday). We don't have any connections here. It's easy when you are homeschooling. We don't have to mess with switching schools. The kids have really not had any major connections with friends here. THey have kids they play with but no body they will be heart broken to leave. Same with our church. We just don't have a real "connection" there so I think this move will be a good fresh start for us. Hopefully to find that special place to "plant our roots". I hope this is it. But if it's not...know that we are following Gods Will for our lives and He always guides us to our next step.

Just thought I'd share this information with you all. I hope it explains things a little where you don't think we are just "moving again" just to move because as you have read, that is not the case. We have put much thought and prayers into this decision and we feel confident God is leading us each step of the way.

Here is a picture of our new home.



So you probably won't be seeing many posts from me for the next month. I'll up to my neck with boxes packing up this house, then up to my neck in boxes unpacking our new house!