The Move to Tooele

Yep, that's right. We finally made it to our destination with the move. We are in Tooele!

This move really did go well, even with the setbacks that always come with moving. We have to acknowledge how blessed we have been in the entire situation. We were able to sell our house with it on the market for less than three weeks. We were able to close on it in less than a month. We had tons of help from family and friends to get us out of the house. We were able to find a home that is lovely and fits our needs well in the neighborhood that we loved in Tooele at a really good deal. We had wonderful help from family in Utah who gave us a place to live until we could close on our new home, and once again family and friends who were willing to help us get all of our stuff into the new house.

We closed on our home in Pocatello the first week of June after having moved all of our things into storage units and a small apartment in Lehi, UT. We had very high hopes that we would only be in the apartment about a week, but it ended up being just short of a month. (I have to once again thank Landon's Uncle Mark for letting us stay in the apartment. It was a life saver!)

Our home in Tooele was bank owned which made things go a little slower than we would have liked. Stacked on top of that we did a USDA loan so that we would not have to pay PMI (saving us a bundle on monthly payments) but that also stacked up the paperwork and red tape that our loan had to go through. Every week we would say, hopefully by Friday we will be in our house, and by Thursday we were feeling sad because we still had no keys. The day did finally come the last week of June and boy were we excited!

The first thing I did was go buy paint to paint a couple of walls in the living room. I would have loved to paint the whole house before moving our things in, but where the closing took so long we were anxious to get in. The exception to this anxiety was the living room walls. I inherited a beast of a piano from my parents when they moved to Boise. Landon curses the thing every time we move and threatens to sell it. It is a full upright grand and weighs a ton. Needless to say, once it is moved into the house, it doesn't move again. So, I got to paint the walls in the living room that the piano would live on so that it didn't have to move again. It was really nice to put our own spin on this home that we had been waiting for forever.

Landon began the grueling task of trying to get our possessions out of the storage units and to our home. We got the keys to the house on Thursday and he moved one load of stuff from the storage unit in West Valley to our home that night. The next day my parents were in Salt Lake at Huntsmans so they came out that night to help us some more. Landon and my Dad took several loads from the storage unit in Tooele to our home trying to get us back to our Fridge so that we could begin living in our home. They worked seriously fast and were able to get the Fridge in that night while my mom brought me boxes to unload into my kitchen. I have to admit it was really fun unpacking my kitchen with my mom. This is a task that I normally hate because I feel at a loss as to where to start, but since I grew up in my Mom's kitchen we have similar thoughts on how a kitchen should be laid out and it was really nice to have her opinion as to where things should go. We found ourselves many times suggesting things go in the same place or my mom would look in a drawer to tell me that something would go great there only to find that I had already placed said item in the drawer. Thanks Mom and Dad for all of your help! We would not have been ready for the next day without you.

The following Saturday morning Landon's mom, Diane, joined us from Pocatello to help us do some more moving. When I picked her up from the shuttle I told her that Trevor had cried the previous two nights because we had to go back and sleep in the apartment instead of staying at our brown house. That was all it took for Grandma's determination to kick in (which if you haven't ever seen it, it is a force to be reckoned with) and she began the process of getting things in place for us to move our beds and dressers to the new "brown house" that day. She called in the help of some of Landon's cousins and by 3:00 p.m. my van and trailer were loaded up and we were heading for our home with plans to sleep there that night.

When we got to our house we had just enough time to open it up when the Elder's Quorum arrived and began unloading things. We have been blessed with fantastic neighbors and ward members who worked incredibly hard for us that afternoon. They worked for about 2 1/2 hours and were able to get all the rest of our things out of the storage unit in Tooele and most of the big furniture into the house. I also had help from some of the neighbor ladies and kids to bring boxes into the house from the garage and taken to the correct area so that I could unpack them. We had about 7 or 8 men from our ward and then the neighbor ladies that without them, I don't know what we would have done. Gosh I love the gospel and the ward family!

For the Saturday move, Grandma Diane helped us out by renting a U-haul so that our trips to the storage unit would be more successful. The U-haul also came in handy on Sunday when we returned to Lehi and our storage unit in West Valley and finished unloading them and got the rest of our things to our house. It was a very long weekend, but on Sunday night there was a great sense of relief to know that all of our things were finally in our possession at our home.

Monday morning brought the grueling task of trying to unpack as quickly as we could. We had planned a trip to Colorado Springs to visit Landon's parents and I was already two days late in leaving. Diane and I had to leave on Tuesday to get to Colorado in time to pick Landon up at the airport on Wednesday. Once again, Grandma's crazy determination and her many, many years of experience moving kicked in and we were able to get all of our necessities unpacked by Tuesday morning when we left.

I really do have to acknowledge all of the amazing help and support that our family has given us during this move. We never would have made it without it. We feel so very blessed by the Lord and guided by him to this place that we now call home. I just wish that it was closer to the family that we love and helped us soooo much.

Here we are. Tired and reeling, and happy to start trying to settle in. Here's hoping Tooele is everything we want it to be!