He is Risen!

I hope that everyone has had a great start to their Easter weekend and is looking forward to celebrating Jesus' resurrection tomorrow! I'm very thankful that we got 3 days off! Last year, good Friday was a bad weather makeup day. However, this year the weather has been so mild, we got the day off! Now we're in the home stretch with no breaks left until summer. May 24, please get here soon!

The past few weeks have been pretty stressful at work, and I've found the weeks going by very slow. I guess this is just how the end of the year is with state tests and trying to finish strong. I'm starting to prepare for all of the 6th graders that I will add to my caseload next year. Many of them have severe disabilities, so my work load will definitely increase a lot. I'm hoping to drop a lot of the extra responsibilities I have this year in order to be able to handle my caseload.

The current dilemma is whether to move at the beginning of May or at the end of May. We've made many pro/con lists, and have yet to come to any sort of decision. The house will be done very soon. They put in carpet yesterday, so all that's left to do is stain the fence, put in landscaping, and install our front door (I'm so excited about this one!). This will probably be my last post before the house is completely finished! Here are the pictures from yesterday:



This is a shot of the entryway from the front door. They finally took the wrapping off of the tile so we can actually see what it looks like.



We will soon have next door neighbors! Let me tell you, this stage of the building process (framing) is LOUD!!!! I'm glad it only takes a few days and will be done before we move in. Now we'll just have to deal with the neighbors on the right of us building, which will hopefully happen sometime when we are at work! :)



These are the guest bedrooms. Not too exciting.



This is the mysterious hall bath that I couldn't take a picture of until they put electricity in because it was too dark. This is the only place in the house that we paid to have something cosmetic done, everything else came standard (or was a structural thing that we added that we couldn't change later, like the patio). We decided to put in the tan counters and stain the cabinets. You always hear warnings to only do structural upgrades when you build, because the builder will charge you an arm and a leg to do cosmetic things and it can add up very quickly. Thankfully, their cosmetic upgrades were very reasonable and everything else just came with the base price of the house, one of the reasons we decided to build (not any hidden costs). They also gave us $5,000 to put towards upgrades so I guess the few things that we did paid for themselves.



This is the backyard with the fence in. They still need to stain the fence and put grass in. We got them to agree to make the fence 8 feet in the back for free, which I am now really glad that we did!



The kitchen with appliances!! So excited. I accidentally turned the dishwasher on yesterday and started screaming because I couldn't figure out how to turn it off. Also, I didn't know if it was completely installed or if water was going to start spraying out at me, ahhh!!! Note to self: do not press any more buttons until the house is ours.

I will say that the biggest blessing the past few weeks has been meeting neighbors. Something we have been really lacking since we moved to Dallas is community, although we have many great friends that live here. One of the cool things about moving into a new construction neighborhood is that everyone is moving in at a similar time, going through the same thing, and are usually at a similar stage in life. We've already met so many people that we know will become great friends. We stopped by yesterday, intending to stay for 5 minutes. We ended up staying for 2 hours talking to several different neighbors on our street that had just moved in that day. We even sat around in lawn chairs in one of their empty living rooms (they had just closed that day), laughing and getting to know one another. One of them is even a teacher in a nearby district. Everyone is so friendly and seems to be outside, taking walks, and spending time with one another. Most of them even have dogs and we have joked about making one of the green space areas a dog park! I think that more than owning a home, the community and the friendships that we will form with our neighbors is something that will answer a huge prayer that we've had for a few years now!

Have a great week! :)

Katherine