Day 68 – { the price of an education }

Things are very well here. I feel incredibly blessed. Not only are my children healthy and doing well but we get to build a house. Not only do we get to build a house but it’s right next to my parents’ home, in a beautiful, quiet place. DC has a good job, we have a son serving as a missionary, we live only a few minutes from a temple. . .I could list blessings for a really long time.

Lately, though, the stress I have been under as general contractor of this house we’re building has started to kind of squash me. Unluckily I planned to wean myself off my antidepressants this summer, while there was plenty of light and the house was supposed to be done, but everything took much longer than anticipated and I am facing the most amount of stress right now, just as I am nearly off my meds completely.

The pressure includes all of the normal parts of overseeing the building of a house—hiring and communicating with subcontractors, making about a kapillion decisions, figuring out how to resolve the problems that come up nearly every day—but also the financial pressure. Without being an expert in this field, I have done my very best in designing and planning this house. I studied books and websites and thought hard and changed things around and tried always to find a happy medium between luxurious and stingy as I decided what this house would be like.

The truth is, you can’t really know what a house is going to cost, until you actually build it. Or at least you can get a good idea from bidding every single thing out and doing all the shopping in advance for all the materials and fixtures. But, by the time you’ve done all that, a year’s gone by, and most of the prices are now out of date or the materials you chose are no longer available, etc. We didn’t have a year to do that, anyway. Another huge blessing is that we’re living with my parents right now, and while that is wonderful, we know that they don’t plan on our staying for long. In fact, it’s already been more than twice as long as we told them it would be.

So I’ve tried to work quickly as well as prudently and thoughtfully. The result is that we are about 2/3 of the way through building a really lovely house. . . .and we have run out of money.

This week I realized how stuck that makes us.

We can’t go forward or backward! The plumbing and electric rough-in are nearly done. It needs wrap, which needs to be lath for stucco, since that will be our siding later on, but the roof is dried in. Way too late to back up and change the design. On the other hand, the money that is left from our private construction loan will get us about up to drywall. No drywall, no flooring, no appliances, no cabinets. It’s not going to be livable yet.

I feel like I have gotten us into the hugest mess of our lives. The only thing can compare it to is when DC failed his Level II fieldwork while we were in Fort Collins. That was a disaster. Emotionally and financially it set us back so much. DC felt truly awful. Here we had sold our house in Arkansas, moved the family across the country, gone into tens of thousands of dollars of debt, and now it looked like it might be for nothing. How grateful we are that it was only a bump in the road, and ended up being a blessing in disguise. It gave us another year in Fort Collins, a wonderful year. Exacto got to finish his senior year without changing schools again. We got to see the beautiful temple finished. DC got another year of time to try to learn this new profession that was like another language to him. It’s all working out just fine.

So I am hoping that somehow this is just another bump in our road. That it will end up being for our good. I feel like an absolute fool—that I should have realized that I was building too big / too nice of a house. But in my defense, I had a variety of estimates given me as to what it costs to build here. And the design drastically affects the cost. My draftsman made mistakes, too, that have been expensive to fix. So it’s not all completely my fault and all along I have prayed over this house, pleading with heaven not to let me make any disastrous mistakes as I took on this responsibility.

It will be rough ahead. The only solution I see is to try to find another private lender to give us just enough to finish and move in, probably leaving lots of work for us to do ourselves. This will require me to take on some part-time work or piano students (or maybe we can do fostercare? that is something I have considered several times since moving here. there’s quite a foster care crisis here in AZ). This also will require us to learn a lot of skills we don’t currently have.

I see us setting our own doors, installing our own stone veneer, building our own closet shelves, doing our own flooring and painting (at least we’ve done those before :), all the landscaping, installing sprinkler and drip systems, etc. I can see cheap or free light fixtures and appliances in this beautiful home, being grateful to have what we need until we can afford what is pretty or nice.

It’s going to be okay. Right?

I have started (out of necessity) to incorporate mediation into my daily routine. I’m already exercising and trying to eat well, and still feeling the anxiety get to me lately. So yep, meditation. I really love a Christian mediation podcast I found recently. It’s done by a hospital chaplain who uses the KJV of the Bible. It’s really beautiful and very helpful.

Today I meditated on the story of Christ asleep on the boat as the disciples start to panic with the storm threatening to overwhelm and sink them all. I have been feeling like the disciples, that this is more that I can handle, but that Christ will help me if I call to Him. Then along with my study of Pres. Uchtdorf’s talk Perfect Love Casteth Out Fear, I can see that He does not want me to be afraid. He does want to change my heart. I feel that if I look to Him and do my very best to live like Him, putting my faith in Him, that this storm too shall pass and soon we will see what this experience was for. I hope.

I am grateful for what I am learning.