In which I learn that raising a child is not the only thing that takes a village…

Remember the movie Miss Congeniality?  Sandra Bullock’s character, a tom-boyish special agent is volunteered to go undercover as a beauty pageant contestant.  They whisk her off to a top secret warehouse facility where a team of experts go to work.  They cut, curl, pluck, and wax.  The woman who walks out of the warehouse bears little resemblance to the woman who had gone in; only the bones are the same.

My house has just had a Miss Congeniality-esque experience.  It has been painted and packed,  primped and preened, and staged to within an inch of it’s life.

It doesn’t look like my house anymore, really.  But boy, does it look beautiful.  And I am hoping (and fervently praying) that someone will come and look at it and decide that they can’t live without it. 

And for the rest of my life, I want to be able to remember the team that worked this miracle for us—making it possible for our house to enter the beauty pageant that is the the multiple listing system.

• Yours truly, who painted the kitchen cabinets.
• Russ, who spent months painting the trim and fixing up the outside.
• My dad & Ramona who blitzkrieg painted the downstairs.
• Alisyn, who came and patched all of the holes in the walls.
• Becky, Julia, and Heidi who whipped and packed the playroom into shape.
• Nancy and Mindy who packed up the books and cleaned off the bookshelves.
• Dave and Denny and their chipper, and the little kids who hauled lots of branches.
• Ann, who helped me paint the kitchen trim then painted the entire stairway.
• Monica, who cleaned out the laundry room and picked up all of the other pieces.
• Dave & Denny, who chipped about 3.5 hours worth of branches.
• Josh, who changed all of the outlets to white.
• Rachel, Jenna, and Jared who did whatever I told them to do.
• Mel, who worked a miracle in a morning in the front yard.
• Handyman Mark who fixed everything that needed fixing.
• Rob, who make sure we were electrically up to speed and put in the new lights.
• Laurin, who painted everything in sight for days on end.
• and Nancy & Mindy again, who made it look like a picture in a magazine.

Thank you all.  Whatever happens, we couldn’t have done it without you…

 

 

PS…I’ve been thinking a lot about this.  You know how we all have stories we tell about the hard times in our lives?  I have a story that I tell about a time when I desperately needed a lot of help and only received a little.   This story will be a much different story.  This will be a story of how I never ever could have done this on my own, and how so many people gave their time to help.  I have been humbled to be the recipient of so much love and service…