Our House: Final Weeks {Week 44 and 45}

Man.  I did so well keeping up with the weekly house updates for 43 weeks!  I miss the last 2 weeks of our journey but I've needed the last 6 weeks to recover from those last 2.  Seriously.  The last two weeks were the craziest ones of all.  My parents took our kids for 10 days so we could finish the house and move.  Saying they were our lifesaver doesn't even scratch the surface.  We wouldn't have made it by June 30th.  No way, no how.  It was the biggest help we could have received.  We are so grateful for their offer to take them and the kids had so much fun.  I'll be posting all their adventures soon.

During week 44 I think Andy got 12 hours of sleep the entire week.  After the kids left with my parents I got to experience the past few months Andy had been living since I was able to stay up until 3 or 4 in the morning working on the house.  I don't know how he did that for 2 months but he did.  We were down to the wire to get the inspection done.  We had the final inspection on Wednesday, June 25.  We knew we wouldn't pass because we still didn't have our stair railings in.  The guy kept pushing us back but we went forward with the inspection so if there was anything else we needed to fix we would have time to get it done and still get certificate of occupancy by Friday and have time to move and by out of our rental by Monday.  We ended up getting a different inspector because our inspector was sick.  What a blessing that was!  The inspector marked 6 minor things to have fixed/done and I was feeling really good about things.  Until our inspector called Andy early Thursday morning saying he was going through our file and had flagged some things from February!  He wanted us to fix something that we didn't think we had to fix and it was a big deal that involved our engineer.  I messed everything up by measuring the wrong side but somehow, someway it all worked out.  We stayed up at the house until 5am Friday morning trying to finish everything for the inspection at 9am.  I was sick to my stomach waiting for the inspector which turned out to be another inspector.  A blessing now that I look at it but that morning I thought I was going to throw up.  He came in with all these additional notes that our inspector had sent him to recheck.  He was remeasuring windows and reinspecting things from our first inspection.  To say the city was difficult to work with this past year is an understatement.  We learned about 2 days into this process back in July of 2013 that we were bucking the system by building our own house and everyone in that office knew us by name and lot number.  We broke the mold and they didn't like it one bit.  I'm sure we were the hot topic of discussion over the past year.  To my surprise he passed everything off and I felt so relieved that everything had gone well.  Then as he was heading out to his car he was looking through the pages of our file and turned around and walked toward me.  He told me our rock walls hadn't been passed off and he needed to go measure all of them.  I wasn't worried until he said he wasn't passing them and we would have to have them redone.  I asked what was wrong and he said our walls were too high and they had to be engineered and a permit had to be granted before they could be constructed.  I told him we had them engineered, paid for the permit, and got one back in October.  He called the city and they had no paperwork of any of it. I think I started crying at that point because the inspector started telling me that no one does engineered walls and pays for a permit.  I kept telling him we did and through my tears I was texting Andy to see if he had a copy of the permit on his computer since our entire lives were packed up in boxes.  Andy emailed it to me immediately and I showed the inspector.  He was shocked and proceeded to cross out the notes he had written and signed the paperwork for approval.

I was numb as I drove over to the city offices to show them the engineered wall permit that "disappeared" from our file and to get a copy of our certificate of occupancy.  I was nervous to go talk with the front office lady that had been so rude to me since day one.  I've always smothered her with kindness and talked so nicely to her despite her attitude.  I was nervous because I was in essence going in to show her something that she said didn't exist.  From her cheery greeting to me when I walked in the room I knew in that moment she knew she made a mistake and was going to try to be nice to me to save her butt.  I've never seen her work so quickly as if she wanted me out of there as fast as possible.  Stark contrast to the many previous encounters when I stood there for 5 minutes as she sat behind her computer screen before she would acknowledge my presence.  I was relieved for my last meeting with her to be over as she handed me our certificate of occupancy.  I was glad that I always took the high road with her even though it would have been easy to treat her the way she treated me.  She was uncomfortable and wanted me out of there.  I learned a great lesson right then.  Being nice always wins.

We have been in our house for 6 weeks.  The past 6 weeks have been just as much of a roller coaster as building the house was.  Living in an unfinished house has its challenges.  The list of things that need to get done grows everyday.  It has been a journey.   A journey we're still enduring.  This process was harder than we ever could have imagined.  We learned more than we thought we could or would.  It stretched us further than we ever thought was possible.  We've grown and have been taught life lessons through this.  It was a wonderful, refining process.  One that I wouldn't do again anytime soon and if we did it again we would do things differently based on what we learned.  Just like everything in life.  You live and you learn.  But it has been amazing.  I always knew Andy could do anything but to see him first hand do everything that he did...he is amazing!  There's no one like him and I was reminded time and time again how unbelievably lucky I am to call him mine.  I've grown spiritually as I've seen the Lord's hand in our lives throughout this process.  In such trivial things I was reminded of how mindful He is of me and my little family.  My perspective has changed.  I look at the world through a different lens.  I'm still learning.  I still don't know why Andy was prompted to move and why it felt right even when I said no.  And when I still wanted to say no, everything fell into place to show me that it was right.  I don't know if I will ever know.  If only to learn what I have learned, it was worth it.

We're trying to get back to normal life.  We are busy with our kids and having fun these last few days of summer before school starts.  Andy is trying to finish our final deadline of the deck and landscaping that has to be done by September 2nd.  I can't wait to have no more pressure of deadlines so we can get back to enjoying the ride.  And what a ride life has been!