Moving

I’m writing tonight from our new bedroom.  It’s kind of a shame to have to get up and leave again, but I suppose I’ll look on the bright side: it’s now all set up and looks like a real place to live!  Ben’s been sleeping here the past few nights since Kim is in town and the beds at the Turner’s house have gotten scarce.  Besides, I think he couldn’t wait to try everything out.  He was all excited about getting to test the new mattress.

The bed has been delivered and all our collected shower gifts of blankets and sheets and pillows and mattress pad has been put on it.  Ben’s clothes are all moved in.  The Tuckfields and Turners (and representative Josephs) moved all Ben’s things from his parent’s house next door this evening and we have all been busily scurrying around trying to put things away.  It takes a lot of decisions to put a whole houseful of things away!  The kitchen seems pretty randomly sorted to me, but things like that are probably good to take care of later when we have a little more spare time.  At the moment, I’m just content not to have piles of things sitting on the floor.

The house has changed tremendously over the course of this week.  Ben and I have spent most days doing extensive shopping trips at Home Depot or Lowes with Aaron, purchasing everything from a new toilet for Grandma’s bathroom to laminate floor for the kitchen.  Most evenings the house has been so full of people busily working away that you can barely move without bumping into someone.  There were even people crawling around in the attic running new electrical and fixing old electrical problems (a ground wire touching a power wire in the garage caused all manner of weird problems this week – we went through a whole pile of fuses before one of our friends tracked down the culprit).  A whole lot of stuff we weren’t expecting to get done until the wedding has been completed, even down to getting rid of the debris from the old wall and clearing all the tools from the living room and garage.  At one point this week you could barely walk through the living room because of all the tools covering the floor, but it’s all clean now.  Jenny’s even planning on doing a Mop’n’Glow cleaning on the floor tomorrow before new furniture is delivered.

We had kind of a funny moment Thursday evening when I brought over all the things that had collected at my family’s house for ours.  Included in all the household items were two boxes I’d packed up of things that were mine.  I have other boxes, but not too much more.  Ben was looking at the things in our bedroom and said, “What are these?”

“My belongings,” I said.

He started laughing.  “That’s it?” he said.

“Well, no,” I admitted.  “But it’s a lot of it.”

“You don’t have anything,” he said.  And then he looked around at the people filling the house working steadily away to prepare it for us to live in by Monday night and said, “What am I saying?  This is what you have!”

I was feeling a little badly a few months ago when I started looking at what I was bringing to our marriage to help get our household started.  At the time we had no real household items (we hadn’t had either shower yet) and I had nothing.  I hadn’t collected sheets or towels or kitchen appliances or furniture or even a savings’ account.  My belongings have always been my family’s belongings, not mine and theirs.  The downside of this was that I had very little I could separate out and say, “Oh, I can bring this.”

Then, of course, we had two showers and all our family and friends got us pretty much everything you could possibly want to start a house out with.  And with the almost unbelievable amount of work that got done on our house the past few weeks, I realized that what I really bring into our marriage – besides myself – is the vast resource of people who love me.  Not only are they around for encouragement and advice…but Benjamin can build an archway between our kitchen and living room and widen the doors for Grandma Lila’s bathroom, Aaron can plan an exact list of what we need to get for each different project, Isaac can rewire the house to get all the switches in the right place, James can run all the plumbing for a brand-new bathroom, Mr. Joseph can raise the dining room floor and the doors to the garage and the basement, Joseph can put new lights in the garage and the laundry room, and so on and on and on.

Someone asked me this week if I was happy.  I said I was thrilled.  Because I’m getting married to Ben the day after tomorrow.  Because God provided a house next door to Ben’s family so we could take care of Grandma Lila.  Because he also provided an army of people to get $10,000 worth of work done for $1,500…in two weeks from getting the keys.  And that’s just getting started.  How could I not be happy?