Reflections from the Journey

2010 was quite a trip for my family and I.  We navigated a lot of switchbacks, water crossings, and scary drop offs on our way to a nice gain in elevation.

The year started with us wondering just how long Kristie would continue to have a job as an Interior Designer at Gresham, Smith & Partners.  The Charlotte, NC office where she worked had already dwindled from around 2o employees to just 5.  While we knew that she had projects to work on we also knew that those wouldn’t last until the end of the year.  It wasn’t a good start.

The upside to Kristie’s precarious job situation is that it forced her to be serious about finding a new job which is something I had been pestering her about for over a year.  My heart and mind was in the mountains and living in Charlotte/Pineville was killing me inside.   I knew I didn’t belong there, but for some reason God had us staying put.  We (or maybe, just I) still had some lessons to learn.

I was able to learn some great lessons and make some even better friends through an opportunity that was presented early in the year.  I was invited to join a small group of photographers that met every other Thursday night to view, critique, and discuss each others new photographic work.   I was exposed to different photographic styles and points of view that really expanded my own view and personal style.   Being a part of the group also pushed me to shoot more regularly, but the best part was making some new friends and companions for my Journey.

As Spring arrived the situation at Kristie’s office got bleaker as 2 more employees were let go.  Now there were only 2 architects and 1 interior designer.    There certainly didn’t seem to be much of a future at GS&P, especially since offices in other cities were also being gutted and some even closed.

During all this Kristie had been talking to some other companies in more scenic and mountainous areas that had some possible opportunities on the horizon, but the horizon never seemed to get any closer.  Then just when our hopes were pretty thin, we got word from a friend in the industry of a position that was just being created.  The position was working in the Facilities department of the Greenville Hospital System, basically, as the in-house Interior Designer.  Needless to say, Kristie got her resumé in as fast as she could.

The application & interview process was very long and in the meantime one of the architects at Kristie’s office left to go work for a different company.  So now there were only two and there was serious talk of the office being closed.  Thankfully, though, Kristie was offered the job at GHS and thus began the moving process.

As soon as Kristie had the offer letter in hand she gave 30-days notice at GS&P and we got cracking on packing.  In addition to all the packing we had a pretty long “to do” list of small projects that needed to be completed on our house before putting it up for sale.  We worked like crazy night and day to get everything ready and got the house on the market July 1st.

Throughout this whole process we had been praying for God to guide us and strengthen us since we wanted to do everything in accordance to His will and not ours.  We also knew from previous experience how stressful buying, selling, and moving out of & into a home can be, and so we also knew we needed help to keep us from killing each other.   We barely made it through our last move and that was only across town and with only 1 kid!

This wasn’t just any move for us.  I knew that we were moving to the place where we would be putting down roots and where my calling would become a reality.  As I’ve written previously (and will write about more soon!), I’ve been called by God to gather other artists together and teach people how to worship God and tell His Story through art.  As a nature photographer I will be teaching about Creation Care / Environmental Stewardship as I show others how to photograph the beautiful (& wild) Creation around us.  Keeping all this in mind, we couldn’t just move into any neighborhood.  Our needs were fairly specific which really narrowed the properties available to us.  Again, we knew that we needed to rely on God for this, so I decided that in addition to praying I was going to fast from meat until we moved into our new home.

On the 5th of July, we accepted an offer on our house.  At the time I was pretty bummed out because I had been praying for an offer by the 4th.  Looking back, I know it was a bit silly and pretty ungrateful for me to be upset about the difference of a day, but I must confess that I felt let down.  In a struggling housing market, we put our house on the market and had an offer 4 days later.  God was working in the situation and He was showing me that it was going to be on His terms not mine.  (This theme gets beaten into my brain by the time this is finished!)

So now we had an offer on our house and needed to find a new home lickety split!  I had been looking at MLS listings in the areas north and northwest of Greenville for a few weeks and worked on narrowing the list down.  Here are some of the criteria we had:

• at least 3 bedrooms  & 2 baths
• at least 1600 sq. feet (preferably more)
• at least 2 acres of land (preferably more) & some of the land needed to be good for planting
• close to the State Parks and mountains, but within a 30-40 minute commute for Kristie.
• good schools
• home in good condition (didn’t want a fixer upper)
• barn, outbuilding, or large detached garage (to convert to office/studio)
• Under $220,000  (which with low interest rates would be a similar monthly payment to our current one)

We had a list of about 12 homes that looked good online and fit our needs and one that we thought was the right house/property for us.  This property was a bit over 2 acres and bordered a large Girl Scout camp in the mountains near the NC border on Gap Creek Rd.  The house was over 2000 sq. ft. between 2 adjacent buildings and had a large detached garage.  We loved the location and the pictures of the home so we made an appointment to see the home and about 4-5 others.

The next morning we drove the 2 hours from Charlotte to Greenville to meet our Realtor and see the homes.  Our plan was to put an offer on the Gap Creek home.  Unfortunately, the first thing we were told as we met our Realtor was that an offer was accepted on the home the night before.  Our hearts sank, but we carried on and toured the other homes on our list.  Nothing we saw really felt right until we got to the last  one of the long day.   It was relatively new and was situated on 11 acres with river frontage.  We really liked what we saw and loved the $180,ooo list price!  The one drawback was that it was a foreclosure and there was very little info on it including disclosures.

After talking about it on the drive home we scheduled a home inspection to make sure there weren’t any major problems before we put in an offer.  We met the home inspector at the home a couple of days later (leaving the kids home with a sitter) and right away started seeing things we hadn’t noticed days before.  The home was in rougher shape than we thought and the inspector began pointing out many things that made us cringe.  Basically, the home turned out to be poorly built and a money pit.  Feeling dejected and crushed we went back to our Realtor’s office to regroup.

Kristie & our Realtor combed through the MLS listings looking for properties in areas where we hadn’t looked before (& for good reason!)  I was using my laptop to also look at the listings but I was looking in the same area we had been looking.  I wasn’t very hopeful, I was quite grumpy, and my faith was pretty tattered.  However, I kept trudging down the path, one foot in front of the other.  I found one listing that I has seen a month or so before when we first found out about the job offer, I checked on the housing market in the Greenville area.  It hadn’t shown up in searches since then until today.  (We found out later that it had been on the market for about a year and then taken off for about a couple of months.  It had just been re-listed with a new agent the day before.)

We decided to go have a look even though I wasn’t too thrilled by it’s proximity to town.  I wanted to be “out in the country.”  On paper it did have many of the other  things that we were looking for so I decided to humor Kristie and go look.  Driving up to the house, it didn’t look like much, but it was more secluded than I had thought from looking at the Google Maps.   I hoped that the inside would impress me.

Now, those of you who have looked at homes for sale know that the seller usually leaves either before or when the potential buyer arrives.  Not in this case!  We were shadowed constantly.  As we found out we were dealing with some pretty strange and paranoid folk.  I’m trying hard not to write some pretty scathing stuff here about the sellers religious and political beliefs (and limited brain functions!) because they REALLY annoy me, but I will try to keep to the pertinent info. Suffice it to say that there were 13 people living in the house, the 2 sellers and their 11 children.  We were NEVER alone in the house.

Despite all that, we liked the house and the 6 acres of land it was on.  Kristie will tell you that she knew right away that it was the right house for us and that 2 other heartbreaks were getting us softened up for this one.  I was a bit more cynical (imagine that!), but knew in my heart that God had brought us here for a reason.  We left the house and told our Realtor that we would think about it and give her a call.

Kristie was really excited about the house and my excitement was growing so we called Beverly, our Realtor, and asked her to schedule an appointment the next day to show the house to our kids.  This time we expressly requested that the sellers not be present and that the 2 big dogs they owned be caged.

We drove back to Travelers Rest the next day with AJ, Brianna, and Amanda to show them the house.  Upon meeting Beverly across the street from the house in the Ebenezer Baptist Church parking lot we found out that we would still have the sellers’ oldest son shadowing us.  Aargh!  We looked at the house again and noted a fair amount of flaws and such that we hadn’t seen the 1st time through.  The flaws were cosmetic though and didn’t discourage us much.  I, however, made it a point to announce every flaw I found for the benefit of our shadow.

After spending about an hour looking at everything we went back to the Realtor’s office and put in an offer on the house.  I’m not going to bore you with the agonizing details of the process but just remember how I said the sellers were annoying and strange and you’ll get the picture.  Anyway, we got an accepted offer and moved forward with the loan process.  Good thing too because Kristie started her new job 2 days later on our wedding anniversary (July 12th.)

Some facts/features of the house:

• 6 bedrooms & 3 Baths
• over 3000 sq. feet (including finished basement)
• 6 acres including pasture, woods, and a spring
• 2 small barns
• near the elementary and middle schools
• large front porch with decks on side and back of house
• in-ground fiberglass pool
• large outdoor playhouse for kids
• attached 2 car garage
• large kitchen
• hardwood floors

So Kristie started her new job and stayed with friends, Amanda & Tobin, in Greenville while I was back in Charlotte with the kids getting everything packed.  I wish I could tell you that the rest of the buying/selling process went smoothly, but it didn’t on either account.   Our buyer was very picky about some repairs that  drove me absolutely crazy and I about blew my top numerous times.  (Our selling agent, Kent Bailey, kept me from killing our buyer on more than 1 occasion!)

Buying our house was one of the craziest and, at times, sickening roller coaster rides I’ve ever been on!  Most of the problems had to do with the appraisal coming in lower than our contract price and the seller’s unwillingness to drop their price to meet it.  There was a gap of $8000 that we couldn’t agree on and it looked like the deal was going to fall through and we were going to have to find a rental.  The sellers weren’t willing to budge at all (and really didn’t even seem like they wanted to move!)  We didn’t have the money to make up the difference since we were already put a lot down.  Our lender, Bank of America, put in a request for re-evaluation of the appraisal, but it didn’t make a difference.  We were stuck, heartbroken, and I was crying out to God asking why He was putting us through this pain.

At the eleventh hour I decided to take matters into my own hands and called the sellers on the phone.  I was sick of going through middlemen.  I got hold of the wife and explained the situation and she explained their side.  We discussed some different options and she told me of a local lender they had worked with in the past who had said they would be able to order a new appraisal.  Having no other viable options, we fired BOA and went with the new mortgage lender.  As it turns out, that was the best thing we could have done.  We ended up saving thousands of dollars with the new lender, Franklin American, lower fees, and a lower interest rate!

In the middle of all this house buying & selling I had an Interior Designer who wanted to use 100 prints of my images for use in a new hospital building in southwestern Virginia.  I was excited by the prospect of that large of an order (twice the quantity of my largest order to date!) and sent her a better than fair quote.  I heard back from the decorator who was the designer’s assistant on the project a couple of weeks later with the news that they definitely wanted to use my photos but couldn’t pay more than $50 each for 100 different prints and that they needed to be 17″x27″.   The generous quote I had given  for 15″x20″ prints on a 100% cotton archival paper (and assuming some repetition of images which is less labor intensive) was quite a bit more than $50!  I was a bit insulted, but politely explained why my prints are worth (more!) what I had asked in my quote and also why I couldn’t crop my images to the very unusual proportions of a 17″x27″ print without butchering them.   She told me that they used other photographers on previous projects who had no problems with that price and size and that the size had even come from one of the photographers.  With this knowledge I know that they had probably used work taken with a point & shoot digital camera.  I respectfully declined the offer.  Despite the fact that I could have used a $5000 dollar check, I wasn’t going to prostitute myself and cause further harm to the photographic art.

Losing a big sale, dealing with the kids, packing, putting up with buyers & sellers, and being without Kristie at home was crushing my spirit and I didn’t know how much more I could take.  BUT, I was about to find out.

As the closing date on our Pineville house got closer there were further snags in the buying of the Travelers Rest house.  It seems that BOA didn’t close out the mortgage process properly (or at least how the said they would) and the original low appraisal was rearing its ugly head again.  After a LOT of phone calls on Kristie’s part and work by Franklin American, everything was cleared up but during the few days it took, the moronic sellers had stopped moving their stuff out and our closing was pushed back.

Our buyer couldn’t move back the closing date so we ended up having everything loaded onto a moving truck or in storage and we lived in a couple of hotels for a week.  During this time AJ and Brianna both started school in Travelers Rest, AJ in 4th and Brianna starting kindergarten.   I drove the kids to school from our hotel on the other side of Greenville and picked them up for their 1st week at their new school.

We finally closed on our house and it was all I could do to keep from jumping across the table and throttling the sellers who by that morning still had not gotten out of the house.  In fact at closing they said that there were a few things they still needed to come pick up later that afternoon.  AAAAAAARRRRRGGGGGGHHHHH!  Even though the house was ours we still weren’t rid of them!

As it turned out, one of the things that they still needed to pick up was there huge dog that they had left in the garage!  We called our Realtor and she told their Realtor that they needed to come and get the dog and the rest of their belongings right away. To say that it was tense when they came back would be an understatement, but, finally, they were gone and for the first time we had the house to ourselves.

We had been running on caffeine, adrenaline, and God’s grace and now we were exhausted.  We struggled through the next few days of cleaning (LOTS of cleaning!) and unpacking, but after a few days the house started to feel less like some stranger’s house and more like our home.  The kid’s were enjoying their new rooms, and Kristie and I were starting to dream again about the possibilities that lay before us.

As we continued to make our way through the mountains of boxes, Kristie went to work every day and the 2 older kiddos went to school.  Amanda and I started to explore the area and my lonely camera started to get used again.  We were starting to get used to our new home and were developing new daily routines.

I joined the Trillium Arts Centre  and began getting my name and face out there in the community.  My green Jeep and my hat have made it easy for people to recognize me around town.  In October I had a booth at a local art festival and now have my photos in the Trillium Arts Centre and the very popular Leopard Forest Coffee Cafe.  In the February my photographs will be featured in another popular spot, The Cafe @ Williams Hardware.

Brianna and Kristie have made some new friends through the local Girl Scout Troop in which my little sweetheart is a Daisy Scout.

AJ is playing in Upward Basketball in a neighboring town since there aren’t any teams nearby.

We continue to put our stamp on this house, making it our home, and have had my niece, Robia, and my Mom & Dad visit as well as Kristie’s Mom & Step-dad.  With 2 guest rooms and plenty of elbow room we look forward to having many visitors in the coming years.

God has taught us a lot in 2010.  We have learned about our shortcomings.  We have learned to be patient and reliant upon God.  We have learned that He does things according to His timetable and will not ours.  We have learned that God’s grace is sufficient.  We have learned that sometimes we gain better understanding through pain and hardship.  Most of all we have learned that we are loved by a Creator whose vision and wisdom is far greater than our own.

A big “Thank You!” goes out to all of you who were praying for us (& putting up with us!) during our move.

We are looking forward to a great 2011 as Kristie settles into her job, the kids make new friends, and I continue to grow my photography business.  We are all continuing to travel on this trail where God has placed us and can see many great adventures ahead.   Our hope is that in some way, whether large or small, you will join us on our Journey.

Remember this:

Whether you believe in God or not, He still believes in you.