Michigan July 2021

 We got paddle boards and a paddle boat.  When it's hot and muggy, this lake is perfect!

Replacing all the old gross, with new.  I'm starting to get excited about this now!

Miles

We love it when the grandkids come play!

Dex

Nora

All the floor is on!

Dean and I have been putting up walls.  This long wall intimidated me!  I was not sure I could lift it.  The wall was laying down, so you couldn't see it from the street.  A young man, like maybe 25 years old, stopped by on his bike, and wanted to know what the plan for this house was.  He also offered to help if we ever needed it.  What?!!!  Did this guy just fall from Heaven?!  We told him we would love help right this second!  With the three of us, we were able to stand the wall up no problem.  We made a new friend that day.  His name is Emil.  He stops by and checks on us.  He has a cottage over by Lake Michigan, and has used the flooring and our stove from this house for his cottage.  

Another neighbor, Mark, wanted to help out, but really couldn't, so he hired 3 guys to help us put us trusses!

So to put up the remaining walls, and the trusses, we had Emil, Marks three men, and Dean and I.

Mike came up and helped us put up the front walls.  We had to wait till the trusses were in before we put the front walls on.

This!  This is why it's worth all the work and headache to be in Michigan!

Dex, Nora, Ej, and Miles

Deaner

We are starting to look like a real house!

Diving meets and soccer games.  This is so fun for me!

Putting house wrap on.

We got all the house wrap on, but don't have the windows in yet.  That's the next step. 

So the house is wrapped and we can't see out.  Emil stopped by on his way out of town and offered his house to us for the weekend.  So kind of him, but we didn't bring stuff to spend the night. Dean is working on the plumbing, and outside, sirens start going off.  Our phones both got alerts on them, telling us to get to the lowest part of our house, stay away from windows, etc.  What?!  We got down to the main floor, and out of nowhere comes this crazy storm! The power went out. We can't look out and see what is happening, because we don't have windows! Such an eerie feeling.  We had no idea how things were going to turn out. I pushed the plastic back to snap a picture of what is going on out there.  So much water!

After the storm passed, we ventured outside.  The neighbor were heading over to our house to see how we had weathered the storm.  Apparently our yard is higher than the other yards.  Out by our firepit was low, but other than that, our backyard doesn't have any standing water.

Where our garage will be, there was quite a big puddle.  We will need to figure that out.

In between our neighbors yards, there was a lake big enough for the kids to bring out the kayaks and paddle around.

We drove around our neighborhood to check on our friends.  Janine was out in her yard, cleaning up branches and checking for damage, looks like she avoided much damage.  There were lots of huge branches in the roads in the neighborhood.  Next we drove past Emil's house, to check that out for him.  His did fine, but his driveway was a a pond.  Looks like there was no standing water in his yard other than the driveway.

Since we didn't have power, we headed back to Amanda's house to spend the night.  Our truck was out of gas, and it gets about 10 miles per gallon, so we were in trouble...Since the power was out in Commerce, the gas pumps weren't working.  We got on the freeway, and were a little nervous about our situation!  We saw a town with lights on, so there was hope!  the first gas station we got to had power, but no gas!  How crazy!  the next gas station had gas, and power!  such a relief.  We mad it to Amanda's, and read about what was going on around our house.   Newton is the road we take out of our subdivision.  They closed down Newton because there were 3 downed power lines on that road.  Oops!  We had no idea.  There was so much water and downed trees that we didn't see the power lines.  Someone had taken a chain saw, and cut one of the downed trees so one car at a time could get around the trees.  Three tornados had been confirmed.  So crazy!

Amanda's house was not even affected by this storm.  It was great being with them, but weird not knowing how our house and neighbors were doing.

So storm hit on Saturday, and Monday we headed back over to our house.  We were still without power, so at this point, we lost all the food in our fridge and freezer.  We still had a flushing toilet, so our life was pretty good.  Our friends are on wells, so without power, they didn't have water either.

We wanted to keep working on our house, which was a challenge.  Dean didn't have power for his tools, so we decided we could install windows.  Dean had to use a hand saw to make any adjustments to window openings, and he could us a hammer and nails to install.

Doing this project without power was interesting to say the least.  Most businesses were closed.  The banks were closed.  Ace hardware was kind of open...not lights on, so they met you at the door, they didn't allow customers inside.  You told them what you needed, and they would take a flashlight, and go find what you asked for.  It was cash only.  And with the banks closed, that created a little bit of a challenge.  At this point, we had no idea how long the power would be out.  we were on day 3 without power.

The lake level has risen about 6 inches.  The water used be be below our dock, now it's bumps into our dock.  Now the ducks can easily get on the dock, so we have lots of ducks...and lots of duck poop!

Michigan, June, 2021

 Dean flew back out to Michigan right after we closed on the cabin.  June 10.  I had a few things, like unpacking from the cabin, and some financial things related to the closing that I had to take care of.  I Flew out on June 16.  To be honest, this was one of the hardest months we have experienced.

It seemed like everything was going great, until we started seeing what this renovation was really going to take.  The house was in much worse shape than we thought.  Time to make this decision a good decision....and that is going to take a ton of work.

One of the first things Dean did when he got to Michigan was buying this beauty of a truck!

 We took off the blue siding, only to find yellow siding underneath...and rotten plywood underneath the yellow siding.

On Father's Day, Mike and Amanda and their kids, and Min and Mary and their kids all came out to play in the lake.  Times like this are why we bought this property!

We took off the roof, which was always part of our plan.  While we had the roof off, we had crazy rains.  Our neighbors assured us that this was not normal for this area!  On June 26, out of nowhere came a huge storm...right after Dean had shot himself with the nail gun!  While we were in the Emergency room, there was a tornado warning for our township!  We knew we had piles of plywood piled on top of our house, and we hurried and covered up the house with a tarp before we went to the ER.  We had no idea if that was going to be enough, or if our plywood would be blown all over the neighborhood.  That was a horrible day.

We tried to pull the nail out of Dean's hand.  We couldn't get it to budge.  

Because it was in so deep, they did X-rays, and then sent us home.  We expected to hear from them, but we heard nothing.  Dean can move his thumb, so we are assuming everything was ok in the x-ray.

We got home a couple hours later to find everything fine at our house.

We ended up needing to stay at Amanda's house much longer than we had planned.  Snuggling the kids in the mornings is amazing, but we needed to give Mike and Amanda back their house, and their privacy.  They have been awesome to make us feel welcome.

The reason we bough a house in Michigan is so we could be close to some of our "Grands".  Even though things were not going as planned on our house, being by Amanda's family has been great!  We got to watch swim meets and soccer games, take walks & talks with Nora ( which may be one of my most favorite things ever!), and just hang out with the Francis family.   

We often get people stopping by to see what us old people are up to.  One couple, Janine and Jeff, stopped by on June 29, and asked us about the house.  They were super nice, and seemed really interested in our project.

The next morning, Janine came by again.  She told us they were going out of town for the 10 days, and wanted to know if we wanted to stay in their house so we didn't have to drive back and forth to Amanda's!  She had known us for less than 12 hours, and offered us her house to stay in!  We were so discouraged, that this act of kindness was huge for us at this time!

She did ask us to feed her cats and let them out in the mornings.

This is Fern and Pumpkin, our housemates for the next 10 days.

We ended June feeling very grateful for kind people.

Selling the cabin. 6/2021

We got back to Utah on May 19, and had our first showing of the cabin on May 21.  We got a full price offer, so I guess this is really happening!  We called the people that were scheduled to come see the cabin on Sunday night, and told them we already had an offer.  They still wanted to see it.  After they went through, they gave us an offer above our asking price.  The first offer had asked us to let him know if we got another offer, so he could have a chance go beat it.  We wanted to avoid a bidding war, actually, we wanted both parties to have the cabin!  We ended up going with the cash offer, so there was less risk of the sale falling through, even though the other offer was for more.  We made a few repairs, had some family come down and say goodbye to the cabin, and are ready for our next adventure! 

Had to have one more "safety third" experience!

There were a few trees too close to the cabin that had to come down.  That was sad, but safe.

Our good friend Ren from down at the cabin helped Dean take down the trees and cut them up.

The deer came by to say their goodbyes/

Caitlyn and her friends Tressa and Juilanna made it a party!

Cristian, Hilary and Curtis spent a few hours there with us.

Wayne and Dorleen spent on more night down there before we turned it over to the new owners.

This was my dad's first time back since he had Covid.  I was really nervous about having him down there as his lungs haven't fully recovered.  He didn't die, so that was a great thing!

Braden's family also came down to say their goodbyes.  So many great memories with great people!

Each evening we like to walk "the loop".  This was our last time.  Its hard for me to keep looking forward.  Change is hard, but good.  I'm so glad I married a super positive guy to help me deal with change.  Because of that, life has not been boring, nor is is going to be.

All packed up and ready to leave our cabin.  When we come back, it will be to show the new owners all the things.

 

This is us, June 9, 2021, after closing on the cabin...and here are Mrs, and Mr. Hales, with their new cabin.