Moving and Breaking in the House

We had a small army arrive to help us on moving day.  The scout troop from church had just been on a two night campout with lots of hiking, but they showed up to help us before going home.  We also had a lot of other friends come help.  In the end, it took three moving truck loads, and several pick up truck loads to get everything out and over.  It took most of the day.  We are so blessed by our friends! 

Even though I hardly packed a thing, I tried to be really meticulous about where everything would land in the new house so that it'd be easier to unpack and set up.  ALL of the boxes were labelled.  At this point, the inside is mostly unpacked and is partially decorated, but I still have about half of our boxes in the garage because I want to slowly go through those things and purge most of it.  (We had over 3000 square feet of storage space in our last house, so it was really easy to just put things in the attic or basement in case we wanted them later.  I have some regrets now...)

Anyway, the only pictures I have of our new house are my 'before' shots.  I'm just going to share a few here.

The little girls room and the boys' rooms were ridiculous until we put up the bunkbeds.

Everyone's clothes were packed in big black trash bags, so those were first to be unpacked.  The boys just dumped theirs.

During our first week in the house (bear in mind that we were renting it...) the kids did their best to break it in.  On day one, ALL of the kids climbed through the laundry chute. (It took a really long time for the novelty of throwing things down the chute to wear off.  I'm pretty sure I was mostly washing clean laundry for a while there.) 

On day two, Laurel found markers; she colored herself, Brig, and the carpet.  (Thankfully, these were washable.) 

On day three Laurel found a PERMANENT marker; she colored the light switches and some walls.  This prompted a quick search for rubbing alcohol which resulted in the toiletries being very first to be fully unpacked.  Thankfully, all of the marker came off. 

On day five, Jim and I were up late talking when a bat came flying through the house.  We screamed like a couple of little girls, and I hid under a blanket and informed Jim that he's the man of the house.  We chased it upstairs and finally trapped it in our bathroom.  After coming up with a brilliant game plan, Jim went in with the broom and I stayed outside the door holding it shut (in case he chickened out and tried to open it...ha ha!).  He managed to chase it out the window, and we've been hoping ever since that it doesn't come back. (Bats like to return to the same house over and over.)