Jake's Tree

Early November.

Jake's tree is still bright and colorful!

Every leaf speaks bliss to me, fluttering from the autumn tree.

Emily Brontë

Back to life,
Christine

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New Every Morning, Part Six

Read previous segments here:

The Beginning
The Injury
The Furnace
The Waiting
Employment

I know it's now the end of March, and life has overtaken me enough that I've neglected our story; but now, I'm back with a long overdue update.

The Lord's lovingkindnesses indeed never cease,

For His compassions never fail.

They are new every morning;

Great is Your faithfulness.

Lamentations 3:22-23 NASB

The House

Back in October, Fernando began working for PSSI as an independent contractor, driving and operating a SAT truck alongside the current truck operator.  Since he was being paid as an independent contractor, we kept financial records as a legally self-employed entity.  Two other things were happening alongside this new development:

One.  We were approved for Medicaid health insurance, after 10 months of waiting.  Now it remained for us to wait for the official insurance cards, without which we wouldn't be able to receive services.  More waiting!

Two.  We finished a year-long unemployment mortgage modification program with Wells Fargo--yes, I feel free to name names now.  We submitted our October 1st modified payment to them, and indicated uncertainty about employment, but also asked if they would consider our current status of self-employment in repaying our mortgage.

Today's segment focuses on Two.  The home preservation specialist, as they are referred to, decided to immediately close our case and refer it straight to collections.  We had no idea this had happened until the first phone call from a rep in the Wells Fargo collections department.  Surprise!  What do you mean we're in the collections department?  No one told us what to do once we finished making payments under the unemployment program!  How are we supposed to just pay back the arrears, when we've just starting receiving a steady income?  These and more questions swirled around as we attempted to explain, over and over and over again to every collections rep with whom we talked.

Our case was finally transferred to a rep (one of those home preservation specialists) who actually called us back and communicated with us!  Her name was Tarica, the lone point of comfort in all our dealings with Wells Fargo.

In order to begin paying our mortgage, we had to apply for a permanent modification.  After faxing in paperwork, talking on the phone, answering questions about bank statements, and faxing in more paperwork, the beginning of December had arrived.

Tarica called to inform us that our permanent modification request had been denied.

Emotions swirled, and Fernando and I tried to figure out what to do.  We formally appealed the decision, explaining that Fernando was now receiving a steady income.  A week after we submitted the appeal, Tarica's supervisor called to tell us the documents we submitted weren't eligible for an appeal, and we were denied.  Now I was angry.  I forcefully explained everything to her (I'm sure she didn't know the history), and asked if Wells Fargo really wanted our house--because we were ready and willing to start paying our mortgage, but for the arrears that needed to be taken care of.  Having gotten nowhere, I finally hung up the phone, devastated.

This was one of those times when minutes seem like hours.  I was numb, knowing somewhere in the back of my mind that we would have to move--but where?  How?  Rent would be more than we were currently paying with our mortgage.  We kept telling everyone we talked to that we wanted to pay the entire amount back, because it was what we owed, but no one would listen.  We were a number in a vast machine.

Only one hour ticked by, one small hour filled with all the emotion I could handle, and I couldn't handle it.  Trust Me.  Just for five minutes.  You can do that, right?  Am I not trustworthy for five minutes?  Yes.  Now trust me for five more.  I sat, numb, somehow trusting Him, for one hour.

My cell phone rang.

It was the supervisor again, who informed me that she had "reached out" to the appeals underwriters, and it seemed that the documents we had submitted had been "overlooked."  Our appeal would be reinstated.

A reprieve.

We waited through Christmas, with a promise that Wells Fargo would not be a topic of discussion for our family Christmas celebration, hosted in our home.

Then, a few days before New Year's Day, Tarica called us.  Our appeal was officially denied.  This time, Fernando and I took the call together, and we were at peace, whatever the Lord allowed to happen.  Our emotions were calm as we talked with Tarica, asking her if she had even looked at the documents we had submitted.  She hadn't, so we explained our argument.

Tarica responded, "Your appeal would still be denied, because you have to have three months of employment, which you don't.  That won't happen until..."  She calculated it in her head, then said, "...January 15."  A pause.  "That's just two weeks away!  I'm going to put your appeal on hold until then.  I will call you on January 16, at this same time of day, and let you know what updated documents we'll need you to submit then."

Week after week, we had wondered why the Lord was allowing so many delays, snags, and miscommunications to occur.  I honestly admit that we were faithless, complaining about the daily barrage of emotions, the hours spent on the phone, the constant mail from Wells Fargo.  And now we knew why:  The Lord allowed those delays to occur so that Fernando could complete three months of employment, so that we could file our appeal to keep our house.

We now waited with renewed hope.  We could see the Lord's hand at work, and it was enough.  Our New Year would come.  Trust Me for today.  We would trust Him, day by day, whatever would come.

If you want to find out what happened, read this next post!


Back to life,
Christine

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Simplify -- The Master Bedroom

Simplify!

Our Goal

A simple and beautiful house

that the Lord can use as a peaceful haven

for my family and others.

Click here to find out why/how I started!

One day, I just started.  That's how I do many projects:  I sit and think about them for a long time.  Then, one day, almost on the spur of the moment, I begin.  Well, on this particular November day, I walked into our master bedroom closet, and stared at the boxes of stuff on the shelves.  I had  decided to pursue a path in my photography that did not specialize in photographing newborns exclusively; however, I had kept boxes of baby blankets, caps, bows...  I stared at those boxes, realizing I would probably never, maybe once, use those items.  And faced with the possibility of moving to a much smaller place, I knew they just had to go.  So I started making a pile piles.

I usually declutter when Fernando is out of town.  I'm not sure why, but I know that he is not a throw-er-away-er (my new word), and if I'm going to get rid of stuff, it has to be when he's not around.  Sometimes he doesn't even notice when I've cleaned out an area, unless it's particularly bad.  Plus, I work much better in quiet solitude.  So there you have it.  I was in declutter mode.

I don't have pictures of the closet, although I did declutter it a few years back.  But I had accumulated more stuff since then, and it needed decluttering.  So I did.  Since it was well organized, it was a relatively easy chore, and I was able to bring several boxes/bags of stuff to Goodwill that same day.

Feeling the freedom from that job gave me the courage to face our master bedroom.  It took me most of a month, but I got the major part done.  I also keep in mind that Fernando lives here too, and I can't touch his stuff.  There are places his stuff hides, and so it must stay hidden.  Oh--he just told me today he's ready to get rid of some of his stuff!  He's really good with ignoring it, and then all of a sudden it bugs him so he takes care of it.

Here's the view from just inside the main door to our bedroom.  Just ignore those sagging curtains on the window; if we ever do get the money, new curtains are definitely in order!

Above, standing there facing into the bedroom, I never thought I'd get to the point of being able to share pictures with you of the room where everything else ends up, the catch-all room for stuff around the house that has no place to go.

Standing directly in the room, here's our master bed--a Sleep Number bed, too!  My sweet friend Becky (and her hubby Tim) gave us the comforter and throw pillow.  The set came with shams, but we don't use them, and a bed skirt, which won't fit since the Sleep Number support piece is squeezed tightly into our existing bed frame.

In the above picture, you can also see, from left, a hanging shelf, empty since I don't collect anything but it was made by my grandfather so I'm holding off taking it down for now.  Then, there's the wall unit with the TV--yuck, but Fernando wants the TV there, so there it stays.  Then a tri-fold picture stand with photos of our boys, and the corner tall bookshelf with next to nothing on it, and a lamp on top which isn't even plugged in, lol.

This room, as you can tell, is long and narrow, and maybe one day we'll have just a TV hanging on the wall opposite the bed--I think I'd be okay with that.  For the below, I'm standing with my back to the west window in our room.  In the front corner, way back there in the center of the image, is my project desk.  I can see getting rid of it someday, since I rarely do "projects" such as scrapbooking or paper crafting.  It still needs to be decluttered, and lots of the craft supplies are ready to be sold or given away.  That's another project for the future.  My room is now peaceful, and a quiet place to lay my head at the end of a long day.

It's not done.  And a simple life is never a place you arrive at.  It is a place you maintain, and I'm not there yet.  I'm realistic enough to know I won't reach perfection, but it's a journey I'm happy to be on because I know that simple is best.  More on the bedroom soon!


Back to life,
Christine

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Simplify -- A Journey's Start

Simplify!

This is the cry of my new year (even though it wasn't 2015 yet...).  I feel the urging of the Holy Spirit to simplify life for our household, and thought I'd blog my adventure for you.  I'll be posting many of my adventures--for adventures they'll surely be--throughout the new year as I seek to create beauty in our home, through simplicity and contentment.

Welcome to my home.

So, to start off, a little background...

In November, as we ended a one-year mortgage modification because of Fernando's unemployment, self-employment, and much lower income throughout 2014, we faced a mortgage company (we'll call them WF, which you can probably figure out) unwilling to work with us to pay off the back payments we owed and were happy to pay back in a way that we could afford.  Due to snags, miscommunications, unreturned messages and overlooked documentation, our home seemed to be hanging in the balance, and we faced the real possibility of losing it.  Which meant:  we faced the possibility of moving.

We have lived here for over 16 years, and have accumulated stuff to fill the spaces that were oh so empty upon our move-in.  Having just recently had the experience of my parents moving after 35+ years in their home, with all the accumulation that that time frame afforded, I knew without a doubt that I didn't want to have to move that much stuff into a new home.  Oh, and that new home would most definitely be smaller than our 1700-square-foot home!  I shifted into declutter mode, and our family made three or four trips to Goodwill with various piles of boxes of stuff.

My kitchen, ready for canning summer tomatoes from my garden.

Now, I'm not a hoarder, and other than snowflake ornaments for our Christmas tree, I don't own any collections of stuff.  However, I have managed to accumulate stuff that I no longer use, that just sits around, that I have to manage, or dust, or tend to in some way.  With a potential move on the horizon, I had the perfect impetus to start decluttering!

My silverware drawer, nice and tidy with my DIY organizer.

I'm a natural throw-er-away-er (new word!), so decluttering doesn't come hard to me.  However, I live with five men of varying degrees of messiness, so I have to maintain balance and be careful with their stuff.

I started with a goal.  Because without one, the journey bogs down and I forget about why I'm doing what I'm doing.  This goal will extend not only to my home, but to my life in general--because, who wants a crazy-busy life with no room to breathe?  Well, not me!  And I don't want my home to look that way, either.  Here is my goal, which I'm sure will be refined every now and again:

A simple and beautiful house

that the Lord can use as a peaceful haven

for my family and others.

Friends drop by?  Come on in, there's couch space for sitting.
At mealtime?  Sit with us and share our meal.
Crazy day for the family?  We'll be able to relax at home.
Your furnace went out? We have room for you to spend the night here.
Troubling day?  I have a peaceful place to lay my head at night.
And so the list goes.

Unrealistic?  I don't think so.  Do-able?  Absolutely.  I've listed a what, a why, and a who.  And I think it reflects the heart I have for my home.

So, time to get started.


Back to life,
Christine

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His Castle - Cleaning the Bomb Shelter (Again)

Want to know what His Castle posts are?  Click here!

We call this section of our basement the Bomb Shelter.  Really.  And it gets messy pretty easily.  I don't often go down to the basement for anything.  One of the guys will carry up wheat berries for grinding, or a big bag of rice so I can refill the rice jar in my real pantry.  And on co-op delivery day, it's just so easy to tell the guys to "carry it all down to the Bomb Shelter for now..."  But, after a few co-op delivery days (and they're two months apart!), the Bomb Shelter looks like this:

There's a lot going on in the image above.  The true Bomb Shelter is really consists of just those large metal shelving units in the back on the right, plus all those five-gallon white buckets you can see in the lower right corner in the front.

Fernando's work cabinets are on the left, with a large cardboard box on top, and there's a table in the center, surrounded by chairs, that the guys will often use for games when friends are over.  You can tell, though, that that table hasn't been used in a while.  Time to clean up!

Most of this day's work consisted of just putting stuff away, either in their respective storage buckets, or organized on the shelves.  Below, you can see the red, blue, and green canning jar boxes stacked neatly in the middle.  Those are my empty jars, waiting to be filled with something new!

Below are those five-gallon buckets.  The two gray-rimmed buckets are much larger, and each holds about 150 pounds of wheat berries.  One bucket was red berries, and one was white, so I mixed them and have been using them up.  We haven't said goodbye to any of our guys yet, but as I bake less and less, I don't want to be storing massive amounts of dry goods.  I'm trying to be careful with the quantities I purchase, and am conscientiously using everything that I do purchase.

That's it!  Nice and clean, just in time for co-op delivery day.  I'll blog about that really soon, since I already took pictures!


Back to life,
Christine

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I Love My Guys!

Time to boast about my guys!!  I love having them around.  Especially the dear hubby.  Just love him.

The weather warmed up a smidge, and my guys were hard at work.

First, Fernando did some research on the Internet and saved us around $900 in car repairs by replacing the brakes and rotors on the Suburban.  *my hero*

The next day,  the guys were hard at work again, pulling out the patio chairs and other outdoor stuff for the back yard.

Someday I'll get in front of them so I don't take pictures of their backsides, lol.

Below is the pool, which we're nowhere near ready to uncover!  It's still c-c-cold right now, even in mid-April, so hopefully sometime in May that job will get done.

Then it was back into the garage to get the bikes down from the hanging hooks.  Love those hooks.  The garage looks messy, but it's a man-area of our house.  So I leave it alone unless Fernando goes out of town.  Like one time last year.  That's a long story; you should go read it, though.  It's a funny one.

Woo-hoo for bikes!

 
I can't wait to bask in the sun in our patio chairs.  I don't care how falling-apart they are (only a little).

And bikes mean spring is on the way!!!

I'm really ready for spring.


Back to life,
Christine

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This DOES Compute!

After removing the train table from the basement and into the garage, we tackled the next project on our list.  We had talked about it for a while, but since we were on a roll moving stuff, we figured we'd go ahead and get it done.

A few days after the guys had come to visit and move the train table, they were back for another afternoon of guy time together.  I walked into the room and casually asked them if they'd like to do another project for me.  I asked with a smile.  And they agreed, without even knowing what I was about to ask them.

Yep--it was more moving of heavy items.  Except this involved electronics, as in--the family computer.  The very old family computer.

First, they removed all the books from the adjoining bookcase.  Then, under Danny's direction, the got the computer equipment and all the other stuff in the desk taken down.  It really was a mess!

Doesn't life seem like this photo below?  I know sometimes mine seems like a tangled mess.  But the Lord is ever faithful, and when I leave it in His hands, He guides me every step of the way.

I think this was the point my regular lens quit working again, so this is the best shot I could get.  Well, Danny thought he was in the way, so hid himself from the camera.

Here's a better shot of the corner where the computer desk would eventually stay.

Danny spent a lot of time getting the comptuer up and running, while I got the books back into the bookshelf, and the stuff back onto the shelves of the desk.

There's still mess on the floor in the above image.  But not in real life!  Everything has been picked up and put in its place, and the front living room is now a spacious study.  The family room, where the computer desk used to be, is now a spacious room, with the seating arranged to facilitate conversation and family time.  I really like the set-up, and I'll take pictures of that room soon.


Back to life,
Christine

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Herbs and Vases

The oregano and sage in my June garden recently looked like this:

They were seriously overgrown, and were taking over my poor parsley plants you probably can't see in the above image.  That was a good thing for a while, since the birds were sharpening their beaks on the parsley, and the oregano and sage hid them for a while so they could get established.  But I really needed to cut them back.  Problem--I don't use a lot of sage and already have some from last year, and I wasn't ready yet to dry another bunch of oregano.  My friend Lori gave me a suggestion--herbs as centerpieces!

Now, I'm not a natural flower arranger.  I got some Mason jars--also Lori's suggestion--and stuffed some sage and oregano in them.  One jar ended up on our fireplace mantel:

And the other jar ended up on our spacious kitchen/breakfast counter:

 
They're free, and I don't have to store them when I'm done--just throw them away when they wilt.  And I can simply go pick some more.  And they're pretty to boot!  I'll take that any time.  :)


Back to life,
Christine

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Onions and Flowers

Danny helped me plant the rest of our onions in our front yard sun garden.  Yes, the garden is filled with flowers.  But you may also notice that there's garlic growing here, too!  When you run out of room in the traditional garden, may as well plant stuff wherever there's room!

My mom gave me some geraniums, and I found a few spots in the same garden where Danny could plant them.

I also used Jacob's strong arm to get a few stubborn weeds pulled.

Then, Danny watered everything for me.

Thanks for your help, guys!  The garden looks great!!


Back to life,
Christine

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My Special Place

Here is my special place, nestled deep in my back yard, which comes to a point like a pie wedge.  Although it is overgrown with weeds, and only half-finished with brick paving stones (which are no longer available in their size!), my Smith & Hawken bench beckons me to come sit with a glass of iced tea and relax in the summer shade.

There's my bench, under the maple tree back behind my vegetable garden.

Every year I dream of one day, when the edging will be finished and neat, and the dirt will be filled with more flowers and plants than weeds and brambles.   One day, hopefully soon.  Until then, I sit and dream in the lazy, warm summer sunshine.


Back to life,
Christine

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