Update

Sorry I have been absent the last week. I was out of town for most of last week, visiting my grandmother and then stopping for lunch with my uncle and grandfather and their families on the way home.

We went to our house this weekend to see everything we had been hearing about for ourselves and it was quite a sight. My camera died so I was only able to take a few pictures. I took a lot more on my phone, but I have no idea how to upload them...I'm new at this whole camera phone thing. So, here is an overview of what we saw:

Basically, we had a carpenter working on expanding that back wall (in the above photo - although this is the original wall, they hadn't gotten far in the expansion before they found the problems) and another carpenter who puts in hardwood floors both there working on their separate things, when the one doing the floors first discovered the subfloor was rotten. So, they decided to work together to fix that only to discover as they went that a lot of the floor joists needed to be replaced as well. When they got into the dining room (the first picture) they found that the main sill that all the floor joists were connected to on that side of the house was rotten as well (and the one on the back side had termites!) so they stopped everything because that was more than they felt comfortable doing. They have been great to work with though and so flexible to work around all these things!

When we went to the house this weekend, a friend from church that is also a carpenter came and ate lunch with us and then went out to our house to see for himself what was going on...what a blessing (he said he was sick for us when he walked in and saw the extent of the problem)! He was able to look at it and tell us exactly who we needed to call and not only that, but he called the contractor and went back out there with him late last night to look at everything together. Hopefully now we are on the right track. It looks like the sill damaged by the termites is being fixed by the termite crew and hopefully now this new contractor is going to be able to go through the whole foundation and check all the sills and joists and replace everything that needs to be replaced.

So it has been a big costly mess, but we are hoping things are in good hands and we will be able to get everything put back together in the next few months. Sadly though, our friend who has been renting the house is going to have to move out since it has turned into so much more than we expected. Bottom line learning experience from this whole thing is - always, always, always get an inspection even if you are good friends with the people you are buying from because they may not know anything is wrong either. It has been quite an expensive learning experience for us!

In other news, we have been praying about several different things concerning our coming move - one being the lack of a lot of young Christian couples to have as friends. Well the Lord is definitely answering our prayer there. A few of the people in the church (one being the carpenter who came to lunch with us and pointed us in the right direction!) have started a new Sunday School class for our age crowd and are actively seeking out couples in the community who are either not in church or just not in a sunday school class. We went to the class on Sunday with one other couple and I am really excited about the possibilities!