september

It's the end of September. We arrived when the weather was a little cooler, it was spring. Then we had a hot and humid summer and now we are getting ready to experience fall as I've been watching the leaves float down from the trees.  Three seasons living in a camper going on almost 6 months. I guess I should back up and explain why we are living in a camper our friends so graciously let us borrow. 

We pulled up to the overgrown, 2 bedroom home and I got out of the car. We entered the home and as we walked through this little home, I cried. I cried thinking how are we going to do this? How are we going to make this work for our family of 5. We just left a beautiful home that needed no work, a home we could afford, it was easy. Now we were entering a project that I didn't want, LOTS of work that was going to need to be done, oh and we were going to live in a camper for a month thanks to some friends who entrusted us with it. Little did we know what was just around the corner. Live termites, mold and fungus everywhere, and having to GUT the entire house. Which also meant needing new plumbing and electric and a giant project outside to put in a french drain to get the water away from the house. That meant tearing up the yard and living in mud all around us for the summer. Let me also mention the amount of garbage we had to throw away and gutting a home also would require a dumpster. To date, we have filled up SEVEN dumpsters. What was suppose to be a month of camper life, has now turned into 5 months as we are about to start October. Our friends are complete blessings...really I don't know what we would have done without their generosity. 

Our hope was that we would be in the home by the time school started in early August, that didn't happen. Then our goal was October and here we are, still no actual home to move into. There are no floors down, no kitchen put together, no sinks in the bathrooms, a shower surrounded by plastic so we can at least bathe in a full sized shower is our luxury. As much as I want to see an end in sight, I don't. Will it get done? Yes, it will, but definitely not on our time. We are at the mercy of those working on this home. At this rate we only get about one day a week of work, if that. Our kids have been troopers. Every morning I wake up Josie first since her school starts earlier then the boys, and we have to go outside and I unlock "the shed" (which stores all of our clothes) and then the main house so we can access the bathroom and refrigerator. I fill up the coffee pot with water from the spicket on the outside of my home and then enjoy the quiet for a moment before I have to wake up the boys who are a stones throw away from me and Andy. Josie has been sleeping on the pullout bench and the boys are in bunkbeds. I said to Andy last night, "can you believe we have all been sleeping in the same "room" for five months?" I haven't used a full length mirror since April...I don't know if that is good for my mental health or not! There have been numerous times you may even find me shaving my legs on the front porch in a bowl of warm water. Or the boys walking from the house to the shed with a towel around their waist! I'm like, "guys you can't do that, there are neighbors around us!" But they are boys and they don't care. One night the propane ran out in the camper as I was going to shower since the inside bathroom had some work done on it. Here I am standing with a towel wrapped around me and I was desparate for hot water to stand in. Andy, being the man he is went in the house and rehung the plastic in the bathtub, so I walked outside (in the dark) with the towel wrapped around me. Just like my boys, no shame. 

I could also give tips on going to the laundromat. We did that for the first month and then it was just getting too much to go and spend the money and time. We bought a washer and dryer off marketplace for really cheap because our actual set was in the very back of the storage unit. That was and still is one of the best things we ever did. But don't you know that washer finally broke last week and we headed over to the storage unit and dug out my washing machine because you know the kitchen and the laundry room are the hardest working rooms in the house. Speaking of the kitchen, I cook on this little stove and oven. You have to light the pilot light every time you want to bake something but I've gotten pretty good at it! The one thing I miss is bacon. You just can't cook bacon inside of a camper, the smell would take forever to leave. I've been hand washing dishes and eating off paper plates for roughly 152 days. I don't even know what we own anymore which is actually sort of nice. I told Andy maybe should go to the storage unit and just wrap up our kids things and give it to them for Christmas! I thought that was a great idea and when I mentioned that jokingly to the kids they did NOT think that was a good idea. Here are some other tips I can offer...if you are going to use a camper buy the RV toilet paper, trust me. Invest in a headlamp for the nights you have to turn on and off the propane in the dark or go up the little hill to feed your animals but you will want the light and a stick to attack the cobwebs along the way. Twinkle lights make your soul happy and always make sure the kids are closing the door so flies are not making their way in! Keep the indoor/outdoor rug by the door so it will trap the dirt. Keep the air conditioning running, even with this cooler weather, especially if you have boys. You got to keep the air flow circulating. Its nice that you can buy camper door locks and plumbing hoses on Amazon when you have to replace them due to your children, I won't name names. 

Life is really hard right now. Really really hard. It actually feels like we have a black rain cloud hanging over us that follows us everywhere we go. It's so hard to find the good, I've pretty much given up on looking for it.  I can talk more about that next time. I just called Andy telling him part of a Bradford tree just fell down almost blocking our neighbors driveway, this is the third one that has fallen since we moved here. I asked him if he would pick me up some cigarettes on his way home. He calmly said, "not today".