Nick's new job

Although we are back from Africa, Nick is still part of his international fellowship. He is rotating in areas that will continue to give him skills useful overseas: dentistry, ultrasound, trauma, and burn care. He is working approximately normal hours every week (woohoo!!!!!) and doesn't have call very often, so he has taken to... being lazy (just kidding!) ... redoing the house we will be moving into. His project last weekend was to put on new doors. Let me give you a little visual for what I mean by "redo."

He's in what will be the laundry room and storage closet. To the left is a closet frame he and a very gracious friend worked on before we left for West Virginia and Africa this summer. The house was actually built as a duplex, but has since been changed into a single-family dwelling. So this room originated as a kitchen. It was about 20 degrees and snowing while he was working, so Nick used some kind of turbo space heater to keep from freezing.

This was an old living room. It had an interesting glass window which looked into, we assume, a daycare play area. Like the art work? We will paint over it :) The old play room will be Moriah and Charlie's room. They love sharing a room and will probably do so for as long as is socially acceptable. The old living room will be a nice guest room with its own entrance. "It's own entrance" sounds kind of fancy. Don't be fooled. Fancy is not exactly what we're going for. Definitely livable, hopefully enjoyable, but not fancy. Investment property? Um, sure. Depends on what kind of investment you're talking about... 

Here is the fanciest part of our house though- the new front door and the fireplace. The fireplace was also helpful for keeping Nick manageably warm.

You can see we have some work cut out for us... cheesy pun intended. We plan to move in towards the end of June, when Nick is finished with the international fellowship and before he starts at a non-profit clinic in Wichita. So we have quite the work ahead, but we're excited. Several other residency friends, many of whom will be working at the same clinic, have already moved into the neighborhood. Our friends, Drew and Lindsay, bought the green gem of a house next store. Others are literally a zip-line-ride-across-a-creek close.

Our move is part of a cool journey, one that started shortly after we were married. Nick and I talked often about the "Love your neighbor as yourself" statement of Jesus' that is plagiarized as the Golden Rule ;) As we talked about how to be doers of that command, we felt God challenge us to choose our neighbors carefully. So we have been on a journey of trying to live in places not because of what we can afford, or because of how much space we want, but in places where we think God wants us to be neighbors.

And so begins the blog-umentary of our reno process and move. Someone is tired just thinking of it :)