Remember when we FINALLY sold our old house and our new house came on the market on the very same day that we received the offer on our old house?  Remember that?  Go back a bit further in your memory… yep, there it is.  Personally, I’ve dismissed a great deal of the raw emotion and pain surrounding our 2 years of attempted and dismally failed house selling.  (Memories don’t leave my brain on their own.  I have to actively dispatch them OUT!)  So when I try to remember, it dredges up all sorts of things that I’ve worked through and released.  I hope you’ve been able to release your memories of our pain and suffering too.  Because now we live here.  And we LOVE living here.  Funny tidbit:  2 owners ago, our house was owned by the Lord family.  So the well-established neighbors always say, “Oh, you live in the Lord’s house!”  We sure do!  I love that.

We moved into “the Lord’s house” at the end of July 2011.  I remember New Year’s Eve 2011.  We were finally able to park our van in the garage after (mostly) Matt’s tireless efforts to get all of the boxes out of there and into the house where we could unpack them.  In June 2012, we dedicated our house to God and did a praying walk-through, giving each space to Him to use in the lives of the Olson Five and the others that we share our lives with.  Dr. Li was our first sixth Olson, but we hope to host more sixth Olsons  in the future! (and seventh?  eighth?  more?  I’m going to get in trouble with Matt for even entertaining these thoughts!)

We’ve been functionally living here the entire time, but we spent early January 2013 doing some major work to get ourselves situated and settled.  It had only been 18 months… you’d think we’d have done this already!  But we hadn’t.  Of course we still aren’t done.  I daresay that on our 2 year anniversary of living here, the basement storage room will still be a disaster with piles of boxes and tools and Christmas decorations and camping equipment scattered haphazardly around in a completely unusable manner.  But if the rest is managed and that’s all we have left, I would be thrilled!  Currently, the office STILL has 7 unpacked boxes sitting on the floor.  That sounds like a lot, but please keep in mind that there were 22 boxes before January 2013!  We have been working!

Some of our projects were long overdue (unpacking), but some of them appeared recently.  You have to live somewhere long enough to know how life operates best before you make giant decisions.  Hmm, let me try to think of an example… I don’t know, something like installing a window seat in the front entryway and permanently drilling holes in the lovely woodwork to secure the bench.  Hypothetically.

We moved Nathaniel to a Bid Boy Bed!  Which meant that we moved Zach to a different Big Boy Bed, since we bought bunkbeds for the boys.  Which meant that since Rissa already received her princess bed back in October, we still needed a little something for her so that everyone got an upgrade.  Behold…

We pulled off most of this while my parents were visiting this winter.  They took the kids for a whole day and Matt took a day off from work so that we could knock out the less glamorous work projects without distraction.

While Matt handled our icky bathroom and restored it to full health, I did a very fun job.  I’ve been wanting to paint one wall in our living room forever.  I’m not usually a fan of accent walls, but our entire downstairs is one continuous circle and I definitely didn’t want to paint all of it!  There is one small wall in the living room that faces the fireplace and I wanted to punch it up a bit.  I spent over a year talking Matt into it.  I mentioned it, he refused the idea flat out.  I left it alone for awhile, then mentioned my hope to paint that wall.  He refused again.  I left it alone… mentioned it again.  We did this for months, and eventually, his “absolutely not!” response waned into, “well, what color were you thinking?”  Because our couches are brown, our walls and carpet are beige, and it was feeling ultra-neutral in our main living space!  I mentioned brick red.  He did the wordless eyebrow thing where I knew he thought I was out of my mind.  I back-pedaled and said I’d really like a peaceful watery blue like the color we chose in our old house’s living room.  He said that sounded great.  I did the wordless eyebrow thing where he knew I was shocked that he had changed his mind.  And that very morning of our work day without the kids, we selected a color and I ran to the paint store before he could change his mind.  It took only 30 minutes of painting and it makes EVERYTHING better!

Ahhh.  We’re HOME.