The Sain's: The Big move

A lot of people have asked me about the move to Brinkley. It has been a big change for the both of us, but I honestly think we could be happy just about anywhere. Any move is a pain, but this move in particular. I hired movers to help me load everything since Michael wasn’t here, and they were horrible. After being 4 hours late, and taking over 4 hours to load my little house, dad got angry and fired them on the spot. Once they left, which was a whole story of its own, we headed to Arkansas at 7:30pm. That obviously wasn’t the plan, but like I said…it’s a whole story of its own. We pulled into Little Rock about 1am to get a good nights sleep before embarking on our next journey.

I’ll start the rest of this story by telling you that there aren’t a lot of living options in Brinkley. We didn’t want to buy a house since we still own our house in Prosper, and it’s basically impossible to sell a house here. Michael looked for 3 months before finding us the house we did. It’s an abandoned house that one of the school board members had. Let’s just say that we are paying $100 to live in a 3 bedroom 2 ½ bath house which should tell enough of the story for us. The agreement was that since we’re hardly paying to live here, we make some of the small changes ourselves. Well…these changes weren’t so small after all. Pulling up to the house wasn’t bad, it’s in a nice neighborhood and looks decent on the outside, so I was a little excited based on what Michael had been telling me. I didn’t see the house for the first month we had it and thank God. My wonderful sister and mother in-law did a lot of labor for us. Apparently the whole house was wood paneling and poorly taken care of, so Mallory ended up spackling all the seams, sanding and painting all the walls for us, while Mrs. Janine and Neenie cleaned and help paint. Thank God they did this because it was still in bad shape when we walked in, so I couldn’t even imagine what it looked like before. There were holes in the ceiling from the roof leaking, birds in the house, nothing on the floor besides concrete slab, water stains everywhere, $1000 worth of new plumbing, etc. It goes on and on and on. Thank you so much to everyone who helped us move and clean, especially my parents who helped drench this place in bleach and my in-laws for helping with all the labor. Since moving in we have cleaned and painted just about every surface of the house, laid new floor in the bathrooms and gotten new carpet. It feels and smells much better than it did at first. I don’t have before pictures, but I will post these pictures of what it looks like now. Lets just say everything is 100% improved from what it was.

It blew my mind that we were renting this house from someone and they didn’t have it cleaned for us, but apparently that’s how it’s done here. The new coach Michael hired had to go through the same situation. They rented a place close to the school and on their move in day, they show up to the same nastiness we did. Michael said his poor wife was up at the field house crying and frustrated, so they actually lived with us for about a week while they got it all cleaned out. It’s all a work in progress, but we’re making the best of it.

Master bedroom. We have our dresser along the back wall where you can't see in these pictures.

My beautiful closet. Michael hung an extra clothes bar, painted, laid flooring, and built the shelving for my shoes, hats and luggage. It's a big closet, about the same size on the other side.