Old House, New House, Good Friends, Dead Mouse

I am finally getting around to posting pictures of our new dwelling on the blog and telling you a bit about it. First, I 'll recap: We got here on January 9 and realized on Jan. 10th, we were homeless. We were in a hotel in Gainesville for 6 days, then Key West for a week. Back to a Gainesville Hotel for 5 days and then Tampa for 5 Days. Back to another Gainesville Hotel (I use the word Hotel loosely...) for 5 days and then a big blessing came along to rent a partially furnished home from a family who had already moved to California, but their house hadn't sold yet. We stayed there for 2 1/2 weeks. It was so much better than a Hotel!



Here are the kids in front of the sweet little house we lived in before we finally got settled. It was kind of in the Hood, but Brad's car only got broken into once, and I was only propositioned once.

Finally on February 17th, we moved into our Gainesville home. It is just a rental for now, but we really like it and would love to be able to stay here awhile. Here are some pictures of the house.

The boys love the palm trees!

But the palm trees aren't nearly as cool as the pool... and when I say cool, I should probably say FREEZING! But they keep asking to get in it. I guess they keep hoping one of these days it will be warmer.


Here's the master bathroom. When the boys first saw the Master suite they asked if they could have this room and if we would sleep in the room set aside for them. They honestly sounded like they thought it could happen.


This is looking at the kitchen, while standing in the family room. It's a nice layout.




Here's the living room with the infamous green couch and Zebra rug.


The dining room is fun and fits our big round table. We got really lucky with the paint color of the room. Since it's a rental we can't change wall colors, but the color of the dining room is the exact color of the pillows on the the green couch of the adjacent room. When you have a pistachio green couch with rusty coral pillows, paint color is crucial to the success of the look. It looks like we color matched the walls with the pillows! (Mom, it's best we went with this color scheme and not the peacock blue and brown look!)

And here's Drake and Rhett riding around the house. Drake said he needed his goggles for safety.

As for the rest of the title of this blog: We had so many wonderful people come and help us move in. The ward missionaries, other great men from church, and Brad's business partner and his family. We really have been welcomed into the area with open arms. Already we have made some good friends which not only make us less homesick, but oddly more homesick at the same time. We ache for the companionship and fun we would have with our close friends and family in Utah, but can already tell that we can have those same wonderful relationships with people here. It's amazing how you can click with certain people quite quickly. So here's a shout out to our wonderful friends and family that we miss so much in Utah, and a thank you to our new friends here in Florida that are making our transition so much more enjoyable.

Oh, and we found a dead mouse in our garage as we were cleaning it out. It had been here a while and hopefully doesn't have any local family.