The Lake House

It's officially ours! Jeff and I have been on a real journey over the past few months. We thought about selling our house, thought about buying some land, thought about buying a lake lot to set our camper on....the list goes on. With the housing market the way it is, and the fact that they are building a new subdivision behind our house, we knew that selling our house wasn't an option right now. However, we really wanted to get out of the city and be able to enjoy some big tress and the sounds of nature. We drove up to Lake Livingston one weekend on a whim and fell in love with it. It reminds us so much of Tennessee; there are even a few hills! Anyways, we knew that finding a weekend home on our budget would be very hard to do. After many trips out there, and some help from a local realtor, we found our cabin! O.k, it is a real fixer-upper but Jeff and I knew the house had lots of potential. We were worried if it would even still be standing after the hurricane, but it survived. Fiday we went up there and closed on it, and immediately got to work. This weekend we painted Lake's bedroom, made one of the restrooms usable and put two coats of primer on the dark paneling in the den. It needs a lot of TLC but we're up to the challenge. I thought I would include some pictures of our work in progress. Stay tuned as more improvements happen each weekend!

Update

These are just a few pictures of our ceiling as the damage was occuring. Things got worse as it continued to rain but all those pictures are on Jeff's camera. We tried to make it up to the lake House but the roads were too flooded. The realtor said everything was O.K. We'll get a better look this weekend. My school was cancelled all week so I have plenty of time to get all this mess cleaned up; thanks goodness. Things could have been a lot worse. We are very greatful for everyone's thoughts and prayers!

Hurricane Ike

We survived! Since they did not have a mandatory evacuation for our zip code, we decided to stay and stick it out. Welost power yesterday about 5:00 and it came back on this morning about 6:30. Thank goodness the hurricane brought some cool wind with it; we didn't sweat too bad last night. However, at about 3 a.m I heard the shingles ripping off our roof! A little while later, water was driiping from our ceiling...from everywhere... out the vents,the light fixtures, out the ceiling fans. We have buckets and bowls everywhere trying to catch the water. When we finally could go out side to assess the damage we saw that most of our roof was in our front yard! There are shingles everywhere. Lake slept through the whole thing. When he he woke this morning, he kept saying "Uh,Oh!" and then he started dumping out all the bowls and buckets of water on the floor; that little stinker! We had also used his plastic pool as a water catcher and what do you think he did....yep, jumped in and said he was swimming. On a sad note, we were supposed to close on our Lake House on Friday and that was postponed. The Lake Livingston area got hit pretty hard and we are very nervous about our little cabin. We are going to drive up there tonight to see it its still standing. Everyone pray thats its o.k., Jeff and I had big dreams for our little cabin on the lake; it reminds us so much of Tennessee. Anyways, just wanted everyone to know we were O.K. Stay tuned for pictures of the damage.....

Gymnastics

Lake is doing much better at Gymnastics now that Daddy gets to come. He is stating to wait his turn without having to be held down and he can now do forward rolls all by himself! He loves going; as soon as we pull into the parking lot he yells "Yeah, Nastics!"