Sick of Moving!

Over the period of just four short months Jared and I have moved a total of three times, and we are both DONE with moving!!! Because of our internship schedules this past summer, we needed a place in Vegas for a while, as well as a place up in Utah. However, because it was difficult to find something in Provo during the middle of BYU's summer break, we ended up living in Salt Lake for a while, then once school started up in the fall we moved one last time down to Provo. Because we haven't lived anywhere for longer than two months, there are many wedding gifts and other things that we haven't bothered to unpack until now. But now that we are finally down in Provo, where we will be living for at least a year and four months, we are putting effort into making our new condo look like a home!

Despite the hassle of having to pack up and move multiple times, we really lucked out with where we lived in both Las Vegas and Salt Lake!

In Vegas, Jared’s home ward Bishop offered us a house that he somehow ended up with through his law firm, which had been vacant for at least the past five months before we moved in. He wants to rent it out, but hasn’t had the time to fix it up. The house is a huge 4 bedroom, 3 bathroom home with a swimming pool and sauna in the backyard. We were basically able to live there for free, as long as we put money and time into fixing the place up to make it easier to rent.

At first when we moved in all that was in the front yard was dirt and weeds, but we fixed it up by pulling all the weeds, getting fill dirt to level the yard out, and finally Jared finished it off by putting in rocks (with help from some family and friends). Because I had to leave Vegas a few weeks before Jared to start my internship up in Salt Lake City, I wasn’t able to help out with the rocks, and haven’t actually seen what the finished project looks like. The house was huge and we loved living there…Our only problem was not owning enough furniture to fill it!

After living in Vegas for two months I headed up to our 'shoebox' in Salt Lake (Jared moved up about three weeks later), where we lived for the next two months during July and August. Although it was extremely tiny, it worked out pretty well since we weren’t able to find anywhere in Provo that was available starting right at the beginning of July. One of Mom’s friends in Saudi let us stay here for cheap, and it was fairly close to the hospitals where I am doing my internship. It was literally about a third of a basement, with the steps leading down to our front door in the back yard of the house. It consisted of a kitchen, bathroom, and bedroom, with one very small window up near the ceiling. At least it was nice and cozy!

Now, after having moved every two months, we are finally down in Provo where we will live until at least December 2009. Our place is bigger than the basement up in Salt Lake, but much smaller than the house in Vegas. It’s three blocks south of campus, which is great for Jared. We moved in September 1^st and have slowly been buying furniture to make it into a home! Our new couch gets delivered tomorrow, and our bed finally got delivered just this week! (No more sleeping on the floor!!!) We've spent the majority of our wedding gift money, but we really love all the new furniture we have been able to buy with it. From IKEA we bought a coffee table, end table, dresser, kitchen pantry, and bedside table. From RC Willey we bought a TV stand and a couch, and once the couch arrives we will see how much room we have in our place and buy either a matching chair or love seat! Once all our furniture arrives we'll start hanging up pictures and hopefully be completely moved in by the end of this weekend.

When our family moved to Dallas, when I was eleven, I drew out a map of our house which I sent to friends and family back home to help them picture where we were living. I decided to do the same for our two homes that we lived in over the summer, and maybe I'll eventually get around to doing the same four our new home here in Provo. I've also taken pictures of both our Vegas and Salt Lake homes, which I will have to post later. PS -- Just to compare the size, our place in SLC is probably slightly larger than the front room of our place in Vegas!