A little feng shui

We are still waiting on the yes from the lender. Our case isn't simple and so there is a lot of back and forth and rearranging our finances. But it is possible and it will happen, eventually. Anything worth having is always hard to get. The best way to really appreciate something is to work hard for it and make sacrifices. We know this from our last house, begging borrowing and budgeting. For five years and up until last year everything went into the house and so when the lender says we are stretching our limits we can laugh and say "we are the champs of tightening the belt and making sacrifices" because we've done this before and budgeting is a lifestyle for us. Renovating teaches you lots about unspending.

The house is ours and I have claimed it already. I have been washing the hallway to the house for the past four days, eight rows of tiles at a time with a toothbrush, "scrub, scrub, scrub" and as i scrub I imagine I am scrubbing away all the roadblocks to our getting the house. Each bucket of grime dumped is a bucket of problems. Each shining tile gleams back telling everyone that this place will be ours.

The entryway is the most important part of the home. It is the gateway to your family. Is your front door dirty? Is your hallway cluttered and piled with junk. This entryway represents your little world. And your front door? Does it welcome visitors or turn them away? Changing your entryway can change your life. The front doorstep is the first place I cleaned and I scrubbed buckets of dirt from the front door and pried off the old black doorplates and polished all the locks and handles with a rag. The dirty curtain covering the door and blocking light, gone! The dust in the corners swept away and with them a new respect for the house and a connection between me and our new home.

All houses are laid out in a nine part grid and each grid represents some aspect of your homelife. This really works because I've done it in many homes and each time it brought results. Yesterday I realized that the financial corner of the house was a mess. There was a storm in 1999 that wrecked many French homes and this one had a tree fall on it in the financial corner and the walls had been full of water for a time until the roof was repaired. The wallpaper was gooey and mildewed and great chunks of plaster were missing. In this corner also sat the one piece of furniture that was being given away to a neighbor, but yet we hadn't heard from the neighbor and they hadn't stopped by to ask about the piece all week. I secretly hoped they would forfeit it because I need it for the kitchen. I don't have any cupboards and we can't really buy any right now. So there in the furniture corner stood a piece of furniture with a giant question mark over it "would it be mine?," representing a giant question mark about where we were with the house. I pushed the heavy piece to another corner and while I was at it I claimed as mine. The neighbor will change his mind. Then I cleaned a little and opened the window and the shutters by that corner to let in light and air. And I stomped around a little and clapped to get rid of all the negative energy. I'm sure this will help and I'm sure the house appreciated being liberated from at least some of its years of dirt this week.

The owners of the house like us and chose our bid over another person's bid, the owner of a domaine in the village. There seems to be a bit of animosity towards him because he actually bid more than us but was turned down. We gathered that the owners prefer to see a family take the house than to risk it being sold to a developer. At the end of yesterday and after some disappointing negotiations with our lender we called the owner directly. He was friendly as usual and he said "don't worry about it. It will all work out. These things take time. Go on in the house and work a little and get it ready for your family." What nice people. We are lucky to have them working with us. A stroke of luck.

Tomorrow we go our gite for a few weeks. We have two weeks before our things arrive in France and once our container comes we have to begin paying for our own housing expenses. This will be really expensive and hard to find in Paris. Our gite is a small fortune for the two weeks. I think it will all be okay by then. I think we will be moving into our new house!

I am most likely back to no internet status for a while. I'm going to keep you in suspense.