Monthly Archives: November 2014

To make everything fit in the moving truck, I took all of our beds completely apart to make them easy to stack.  Here is Lauren, helping me get that job done.  We also gave the girls bed a new coat of paint.  It got some dings during the move, but we were able to just touch it up when we got here.I have been filling my freezer and stocking my pantry full this summer.  I was thinking I would have to throw most of my items away.  But I carefully stacked everything into one of my freezers and packed it tight.  We took this one down with us and it stayed frozen perfectly, no wasted food.  The worst was having to empty it and refill it as we moved it from the basement to the moving truck and then out again.  We ate a lot of corn, cabbage, and tomatoes before we left for the last 2 weeks of dinner.  My children sure were thankful when we were blessed with some homemade meals made by friends.

We had brought in our little picnic table for the children to eat meals on since the table was taken apart.  They enjoyed our picnic style meals for the last days.   Having beds taken apart and stuff packed away, we resorted to sleeping in the living room on the couches and doing most of our existence in this one room.  It was okay, my children played with boxes, and diving off the couch onto the pile of blankets was a daily fun activity.  They did an awful lot of coloring on boxes, because toys were packed up.

It seemed the house was almost always in a constant mess.  The little that we didn’t pack just kept making messes.  I would recommend you step your guard down and just don’t worry about it.  We would clean up once a day and not worry about seeing constant mess.  For the most part I was busy packing things up, no time to worry about everything being picked up.

I made sure to get ALL of my packing done the weekend before we were going to leave. It made the last week that we were staying perfect to be able to go visit with friends and relax a bit.  I did all my shopping for items the week before so no need to do more running.   That left the final days in Michigan perfect for getting together with friends and enjoying them, instead of worrying that I had to get back to finish packing.  We had a great time, my children enjoyed playing with friends and it made the little bit of crazy that we had more normal.

We got our truck from Penske.  I would so recommend them for one way moves.  If you join AAA for $50 a year, and order online you can save about 20 percent on your purchase.  That amounted to about $500 in savings for us!!!  Want to know how to load a moving truck super fast????  Find another large family that can come and help you and you will get it done in a few hours!!!  We had most everything moved within an hour.  Then we had to stop  and take doors off refrigerators, move freezers, the harder time consuming ones.  I was still amazed at how quickly it went.  Thank you again for lots of hands!!!

We got the truck early on a Thursday and we didn’t leave until Saturday.  They give you 5 days to have the truck no matter what, so instead of holding onto it after we moved, we took the extra days beforehand so we could slowly pack, worked out the best.

I kept our meals simple and easy for the last few days.  Nothing that would require any big work.  I did bake some granola bars and used them for breakfast and snacks. I didn’t have a lot of junk food, tried to keep it somewhat healthy to avoid any meltdowns from the little ones.  Here the children were eating breakfast, bananas and granola bars.  Definitely kept some favorite shows on the laptop.  That saved my sanity on more than one occasion.

The day before we left, myself and all the children went to stay with friends.  We enjoyed a nice day of relaxing and having normal as Dad and Collin finished up packing the truck with garage stuff.  I was able to wash some clothing, because the washer was packed and I didn’t want to have to worry about a bunch of dirty laundry when I got down there.  I also gave all the children a bath and put them in their traveling comfy clothes.  We enjoyed good food and fun play with friends.  I even took a nap because we were supposed to be driving later that night.

Well my husband had called me earlier that day and notified me of an arctic storm coming through where we were going to be traveling.  It was this freak of a storm that was going to be dropping snow and ice.  I was like well lets just pray and leave it up to God, He knew when we planned on leaving and if He doesn’t want us to go, He will make it clear.  Well I planned on leaving that night at about 11 pm.  My husband called and let me know that the power was out and this horrible storm was blowing and it was raining and miserable out.  He said it was impossible to load up cause he couldn’t see anything.    I thought that I would get home, maybe help him load and then we would leave a bit later in the night.

I got home and it was miserable, cold, rainy, and awful.  I decided to put the children inside and to bed.  It was cold and we didn’t have any power so it made it worse.  We slept in our coats and all bundled together.  Thought the power would come on soon and we would go.  We fell asleep, I woke up a bit later and was so cold, I just prayed “Lord, is this how our last night in Michigan was going to be?”  I woke back up to the heat coming on and lights popping up.  We had power!!  Looking back, it gave my husband, son, and myself time to sleep.  We were going to be driving for 19 hours and needed that sleep or we wouldn’t of made it.  Funny because our street was the only one without power that night.  Around the corner they had power, but not us.   Also as we were driving through the mountains, they got hit with a ton of snow the day before.  It gave them enough time to get the roads plowed for safe traveling.  God is good!!!

The ride was long.  We went slow.  With 3 cars in a row, one being a moving truck pulling a car, it was slow.  The children were fine, enjoyed seeing stuff, stayed occupied with new shows I got for them on the tablet.  It was a pretty good time.  We had bagels for breakfast, sandwiches for lunch and we stopped at McDonalds for dinner.   Since we drove for so long, by 1 am I was tired.  We pulled into a truck stop and slept for about an hour to get rejuvenated.  That helped hugely.  Driving through the mountains at 40 mph because it was cold and we didn’t want to hit ice was hard.  It was dark, all I could see was shear rock on the left and drop off to the right.  It was probably really pretty but I didn’t get to see it, just concentrated on the road.  Maybe that was a good thing, I have heard it is intimidating to drive through that, but if you can’t even see it—its out of sight, out of mind:)

We filled the vehicle tanks full of gas when we left.  My husband filled his moving truck 2 times with diesel and my van and our car we topped off 2 times.  The first time cost me $25 which in a 15 passenger would be about 1/4 of a tank.  The next stop was $50 and that was about 1/2 full.  We did not fill them anymore.  Tell me, how can you travel 700 miles in a 15 passenger van and ONLY use 3/4 tank of gas????  Only with God.

We finally pulled into our new home at 4 am in the morning.  Again a freak accident of nature but it was so cold here.  The home thermometer was 29 degrees.  It kept my freezer foods quite solid without worrying about thawing!!!  As I was driving, it was tough those last few hours, I was praying that the home would be sufficient.  We had to do everything without seeing it in person, so we had no idea how it would look in person, but I can honestly say it is perfect!!!

Here are some not-s0-perfect photos, how it looked for about 2 days before we got everything put away.

Lauren is awesome at putting things together like bookshelves and beds.  Something my brain does not like doing, I thank the Lord for her ability that way.

The weather returned to normal after a day, here we took some time out from unpacking to enjoy jumping into the leaves Collin and Evan were raking.

Fall is just beginning here so we still have lots of leaves on the trees.  Living up on a mountain there is plenty of leaf fall.  The boys did the entire yard to clean up all the dead stuff and by the next day it was covered again. 

Back to reality, putting beds together was the worst.  The homemade ones were hard, because we built them out of my husbands brain, we finally got them but it took some time.  I should have labeled the pieces, next move:)

Our neighbors probably didn’t like seeing so many boxes outside, it was only like this for a day, this is just where the children were playing while we unpacked.

Everything that I “worried or questioned about” God answered and made it good.  I had a huge pantry at my old home, but this house didn’t have a basement pantry area. I was thinking I would be storing food in my bedroom, but the kitchen cabinet space is huge.  I have plenty of room for all my pantry food plus my regular kitchen stuff and there still is empty cupboards.

The bedroom sizes are perfect.  I will do some videos on that later.

All in all, God is awesome, always is, always will be.  I am thankful for His guidance and so happy that He has made the move effortlessly so we don’t question the things we do.

Watch for some videos of our first weekend in North Carolina.

I am back and ready to regularly blog!!!  What an eventful month we have had.  For those that don’t know the story, I apologize to those that already do, I will share it in short form well as short as I can.

My husband and I were all set to start the process to buy a home in Michigan, got all the paperwork going, started looking, did everything we were supposed to do.  Meanwhile, my husband received a phone call from a company in North Carolina that was interested in hiring him.  He thought it was all good, but told them, that it wasn’t a good time.  He wouldn’t be able to move his large family 700 miles away at this time….too expensive.  Well this company came back and said, we would like to pay for your family to move, we will give you a check and you spend it as you need it to get down here.  We were stunned.

Meanwhile, we were waiting on paperwork from our mortgage company to go through, so we started looking for homes in North Carolina.  The area we were needing to live in, was very expensive.  Like ridiculously expensive.  Our large family was not going to be able to make it.  The very few homes we did find, the owners were like, “Oh, large family, I don’t know the septic might not work.”  or “Oh, you have a dog, that will cost you $300 in pet deposit fees.”  It was not looking good at all.  We were literally down to the last few days of when we had to decide to take the job or not and we found a home.

This home, did not look very big in the photo, that is why I didn’t consider it.  Well it was to our advantage, the home is gorgeous, quite spacious for us and amazingly perfect.  Oh, and the price is what we are used to.  It literally was down to the last 2 weeks that the application went through and his job contract was signed, it fell into place perfectly.  Oh and by the way, no dog deposit and no lease contract.  Just stay as long as we like.  I didn’t like the idea of having to be locked into a yearly lease not knowing what the home would be like. Again God alleviated that fear and gave us this option.

We prayed for direction as to what avenue we should be taking, buying the home in Michigan or making the move to North Carolina.  We did everything that we could physically do ourselves and then left the rest up to Him.  A few days after we got the okay for the home in North Carolina, our mortgage company called and was like, “I don’t know what happened, but I finally got all your paperwork in order.”  I knew it was God giving us clear direction towards North Carolina by stalling out work in Michigan.

We immediately set to work.  Put all of our large items up for sale on Craigslist.  We had pretty much everything sold in 2 days!!!  The remainder of things I  had up, went later that week.  I was even about to throw out some lamps on the last days of packing, and a woman called and wanted them.  I also had our brand new air conditioners up for sale, not a single call and I had them cheap.  I assume every home down south had central air because of the heat, well after talking to our landlord she says, Oh’ we use window air conditioners:)    We would be needing those. God is so good.

We went to some dumpsters to look for boxes and the first one we found, we got tons of huge boxes.  God was making the things that would be stressful for me as the Mom easy.  I was thanking Him each and every step of this journey.

I started packing up our items, and setting aside others to give away.  I can’t say that I had a strategic plan for packing.  I would have liked to keep all the same items together in boxes and containers, but when you are moving 700 miles and have to fit EVERYTHING in a 25 foot moving truck that you own, you squish as much stuff as you can in every corner.  We had pasta packed with propane tanks, food mixed in with clothing, each and every little space was packed tight. I designated our dining room as the boxes room and just kept packing as I went through my week.  I had to get in doctor appointments this last week and was able to get everyone in at last minute notice—another testimony of God.

Lots of phone calling to get things switched over to a new address, canceling things here and starting things there.  That took up much of my time.  Oh and I still was trying to jam 2 weeks of school into 1 week so we could be done and take a break.  Another testimony….I don’t usually ever plan out my school year as much as I did this year.  I had no idea we were going to even think of moving this year, but this summer I planned and plotted out my entire school curriculum for the year,and get this……in November I even planned on doing school for just 2 weeks in that month.  Even when I was going over my schedule before I was moving, I thought to myself, “why did I take such a big vacation time in November??  Oh well it would give us some extra days I guessed.  Well to my surprise, how wonderful it was to remember that I took off all that time in November when we would be making the move.  I didn’t know, but God did!!  In Michigan we have zero homeschooling laws, in North Carolina, they are much stricter and having that planned out schedule alleviated a huge amount of stress for me.  God is good!!

Look tomorrow for part 2 of large family moving and see how my faith was strengthened hugely by relying on God throughout this life changing event.