House Beautiful

Pretty much the rest of July and August were spent getting our house ready to rent starting August 31st.  Allen is taking a sabbatical to Baltimore starting in January and since we can't afford to pay ou mortgage here and rent there, we knew we'd have to rent out our house.  Krysta, the girl who cuts my hair, has had a lot of experience renting in provo and told me that the market is MUCH hotter starting before school than during the middle of the year.  It would be horrible to try to rent in January and not find any takers, so we made a push to get out before school started.  Here are the photos from my ad from ksl.com



I had three calls the first day and one of them was a family that seemed perfect -- professional parents, 2 kids, careful and well recommended by previous landlords.  So we arranged things between us set to the task of preparing to box up our lives for a year.  We determined to leave all of the furniture for them to use and to pack up our personal things -- nothing in the drawers or cabinets.  We sorted and donated and cleaned and moved things around for weeks.  It was actually really good for me (thought painful).  I don't know that I'd ever make myself go through the whole house at once and really purge.  We moved to my parents' basement in mid-August so I could have 10 days to get everything really cleared out with lots of help from Shari, my mom, Shauna & Tommy, not to mention all of the kids friends who watched my kids.  Here's how it looked the morning the Frenchies moved in:



And here is all of our junk, squished into the basement storage room.  Even after all that purging, we've got way too much.