Moving…again?!

Tomorrow at 10 am, we plunge headlong back into homeownership. After our home in Central Florida sold—a miracle, given the distressed real estate market there—we started looking in New Bern, but we didn’t find anything compelling, and we had more or less decided that we would continue to rent for another six months or so.

And then, in the same week that we learned that the house we were renting was going into foreclosure in mid-August, this gem hit the market. It had House of Gjertsen written all over it (at least, we thought we could make it out under all the overgrown foliage):

It’s in a great, established neighborhood (Trent Woods), but in a newer section built in the ’90s so it has an open-feeling kitchen and no formal living room. It has the cheaper of the two utility companies in New Bern (Progress Energy), plus natural gas heating & stove…a great park just around the corner…walking distance from a good elementary school…and it’s only FOUR minutes from John’s office!

It hit the market on a Thursday night at a pretty attractive price; we saw it that Friday, made an offer on Saturday, and by Monday morning we were under contract. The many houses we looked at in May and June helped us see what a great floorplan, and awesome deal, this one was.

Here’s the floorplan, as I roughed it in for my dad, who was trying to picture it from our shaky video footage. There is a 1-3 split of bedrooms, with the master suite on the left and the other three bedrooms on a private hallway to the right.

Almost 3,000 SF, 4BR, 2.5 BA, with a finished room over the garage (“FROG” in Realtor lingo) and an air-conditioned brick workshop building in the backyard. Drool, drool!

Here’s the foyer and the dining room…

Better shot of the dining room…

Big family room with a gas fireplace! more wood floors, and prewired speakers…

Sliding doors to the back patio from there, and the kitchen back to the left…

Kitchen has a gas stove and tons of cabinet storage space…this pic only shows part of it. I’ve never had so many drawers!

One of the things that really sold us was the built-in computer desk in the eat-in area behind the kitchen. We really like having the computer in a “public” part of the house, ideally near the kitchen, yet not in the front of the house (because the desk is always a mess!). So this was a super sweet configuration.

Painting the master bedroom and closet (they’re copper-brown right now) and replacing the worn carpet in all the bedrooms will be our big projects next week, before the furniture is moved over on Friday. I can’t wait to see the transformation!

We chose a sort of aqua or blue-green for the walls to accent our silver and dark wood furniture. We will post photos after we’re done!

The master bedroom opens up onto the brick screened porch, which also connects to the desk area and the patio:

The master bath is painted with gold stripes, which we’re not crazy about, but it has a lot of light and a fancy cultured marble tub…

We love this floorplan because it has four bedrooms, all on the ground floor. I wasn’t crazy about becoming a turbo StairMaster on laundry days or whenever the baby woke up. Here is the private hallway for the secondary bedrooms and second bath, with a great closet to boot:

Here’s a sample secondary bedroom. This will actually be the guest room. Notice the trees that create lots of privacy and shade!

The only thing on the second floor is a huge bonus room, which will be empty for a while until John and I divide it into a sewing room and a home theater someday. Here it is with the prior tenants’ stuff still in it:

The house is on 0.72 of an acre, with a great stone tile patio and lots of backyard privacy—only one neighbor to the side, a wooded lot on the other side, and lots of trees in the back. There is a small backyard lawn area right off the patio. Lots of room to garden, if we can get some trees out eventually! At this time of year, the shade is delicious.

Aaaaand…a 16 x 18′ brick workshop. One word: mancave!

Woohoo! We are so excited! We will start moving boxes, ripping out carpet, and prepping to paint tomorrow, so we may not post for another week or so. God has provided a new House of Gjertsen, and we hope it will someday be filled with as many happy memories and great friends as the last one!

About 70 days ago, my Facebook status was:

Friday night : finding a replacement for Gino’s Pizza :: Sunday morning : finding a replacement for Orlando Grace.
Both endeavors have left me hoping there’s something else out there.

All the colons, above, are the Aristotelian notation for an analogy. Since 2005, I understand analogies have been eliminated from the SAT. Kids these days… how can we expect them to think logically?

I digress. This post is not about analogies.

Nor is it about pizza—though I’m happy to report we did find a reasonable approximation of Gino’s at Mario’s in Havelock. (However, their pizza comes with two extremely thin paper plates wedged under its edges and no serving utensils, so we bring our own plates and silverware. Makes us look really odd, but have you ever tried to cut pizza with a plastic knife?)

No, this post is about finding a place to worship God in small town, USA.

But first, here is the obligatory photo of our little speed racer, without which I’m sure I’ll get flamed in the commentary:

By brief way of background—for those who have not known us well, who maybe stumbled into our little “House” from Epbot—Abby and I are Calvinists. In a nutshell, that just means that we believe in a God who is not thwarted by anything, whose perfect wisdom and love and supremacy are revealed in the Bible. We believe—and our lives bear testimony to this reality—that God is all about rescuing sinners from eternal punishment, the just consequence of our sin.

We all start off as enemies of God, believing that we know better than he does, and thinking that he is forbidding good things out of meanness when we read his rules for a happy life. But God loves us and wants us to be part of his family, having mercy on us without compromising His holy justice toward our sins. He accomplished this through the atoning death of his son Jesus, which is the gospel—his very own blood paid to punish our guilt. The nuance with Calvinism (or monergism) is that we believe God actually saves the elect, not merely makes salvation possible to all; the rescue starts with the Rescuer, not the choices of men and women who the Bible describe as dead in their sins. In every heart that cries out to God for mercy and desires to be a part of his family, the Holy Spirit has first done a work of regeneration to first incline it to act that way.

Ah, such boring subtleties these must seem to some. Let’s see if Shai Linne can help make it more interesting:

Anyway, that’s our background and how we’ve come to understand our own adoption into God’s family. Where we’ve moved to, there’s a pretty strong historical influence from Free Will Baptists and Wesleyans, who take a different view of grace. While we affirm that many Christian denominations make up the Church as a whole, whether they agree with us or not, our hope to find a congregation with a similar understanding of grace limited our choice of churches.

Additionally, Abby and I are emotionally-motivated, sing-at-the-top-of-our-lungs kind of worshipers. (That’s probably why we got married: we could actually stand next to each other in church and hear someone besides ourselves.) The church we left back in Orlando was a good fit—it had instruments that plugged in as well as an intentional connection between theology (what we believe about God) and a heartfelt affection to God. No doubt that’s a relatively new style for reformed churches, influenced by leaders like John Piper and C. J. Mahaney.

Well, we knew in advance that New Bern was probably not going to have a carbon copy of Orlando Grace. But we’ve spent a lot of time looking for one, which has been the most discouraging part of this whole adventure of moving. In the lack of a local fellowship to connect with, I’ve felt the kind of dulling or stalling-out of my faith. Last week I found the phrase “ineffective or unfruitful” in this passage particularly unsettling:

For this very reason, make every effort to supplement your faith with virtue, and virtue with knowledge, and knowledge with self-control, and self-control with steadfastness, and steadfastness with godliness, and godliness with brotherly affection, and brotherly affection with love. For if these qualities are yours and are increasing, they keep you from being ineffective or unfruitful in the knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ. —2 Peter 1:5-8

Prior to making the decision to relocate, I emailed a questionnaire to several New Bern churches. I guess it’s no surprise that the most encouraging response came from a pastor who’s church we’re now prepared to join.

Tabernacle Baptist Church is a historical church in downtown New Bern which has been around since the 1800s, but has been led for about a year and a half by a young pastor with a shepherding heart, Scott Gleason. I’ve corresponded with Scott via email and at lunches on a couple occasions, and Abby and I are convinced that Tabernacle is where we’re going to peg our tent, so to speak.

We’ve been greeted very warmly there, and have been encouraged to see a wide spectrum of generations worshiping there together. Scott is a fine preacher, and strikes me as a patient, peacemaking man, with a heart that beats strongest for discipleship.

So tomorrow we’ll probably do the (awkward, to Abby) Southern Baptist thing, and walk down the aisle during the invitational, formally expressing our desire for church membership.

It doesn’t match exactly the template we were looking for in terms of doctrine or worship style, but there is enough there to make it work. Perhaps we’ll have to bring our own plates and silverware. (Not really—I’m drawing an analogy.)

Tonight we celebrated a hard search completed with a pie at Mario’s.

Valor’s Superman video was recently featured on our friend Jen’s new blog, EPBOT. He shares the post with his young ninja friend, Isaiah (or “Mister I”) who used to come play with us once a week. Step back in time a moment and remember how…

Those buddies used to laugh together…

Cry together…

And recount their heroic exploits to each other…

But Isaiah never told Valor the secret of his amazing superhair.

Read the comments at the end of the EPBOT post if you want to feel the love! We miss you, Mister I, and thanks, Jen!

After a month or two of backing up, Valor passed the 10-month mark and sprang into action, developmentally speaking. First, he was able to sit up by himself (from a lying down position). I walked into his room after his nap one day and found him sitting up. Then a week went by before he did it again, making me wonder if it was a fluke. Then I would see him sitting up again. Thursday morning after I found him sitting up in his crib, he had also detached the breathing monitor’s velcro straps, disconnected its cord (an RJ11 connection, no less), and left it on the other side of his bed. That’s when we knew it was time to pack away the monitor, take out the bumper, and lower the crib.

We were all betting that Valor would walk before he crawled. Wednesday I told my best friend Susan that Valor was cruising between chairs, but was lunging more than crawling when he was on the floor. She commented that her first daughter learned to walk by pushing a box. That sounded like a great idea, so I found a box and we tried it out. At first the box slipped over the vinyl floor so quickly that he couldn’t keep up with it and kept falling down. But Thursday he was doing a little better, so I set the camera on the floor to film him. However, the sight of a cute electronic gadget on the floor was so enticing that before I could pick him up and take him to the box, he tentatively but deliberately crawled to the camera.

Valor still prefers walking to crawling, and he primarily crawls to find me and get me to help him walk. His favorite kind of walking is holding someone’s hands and “driving” himself where he wants to go.

But he is also becoming a box-walking pro, and loving every minute of it. This accomplishment occurred on Friday:

I’m still stunned; it was all gradual, but the end result of sudden locomotion still leaves me giggling with wonder. When I look around and find Valor five or ten feet away from where I left him, I am thrilled. Movement is such an amazing gift. Recently we approved a new comment on an old post which caused us to re-watch a vignette from the past: me helping James try to stand. He looks so much more floppy and weak than his brother, even though he was at the strongest point in his life. Standing was a huge accomplishment, a step toward independence and maturity, even if he could still only do it with my support.

Like James, Valor is also very proud of himself when he moves. On the crawling video you might have noticed him clicking his tongue with self-approval (a sound he learned from his Grandpa). When he started walking with help, he made little boastful sounds and stopped for a victory dance every so often.

Every day Valor does something new, and discovers something new. Today he pulled to stand on at least four new pieces of furniture, including the vacuum cleaner which promptly fell over and dumped him to the ground. He even pulled up on my legs using my shorts as handles (good thing I was wearing a belt). He has learned to make kissy sounds—he actually did them for the first time in the box-walking video, above.

New abilities have expanded his investigations of the house. He opens and shuts cabinet doors, squats to feel the texture of a bathroom mat, peers over the edge of the bathtub, and pats the trash can lid. When he discovered that the toilet was off-limits, he settled for a sample of toilet paper. Hmmm. The taste was pretty bland, but the mayhem potential for this little stash was off the charts.

Valor’s communication skills are developing even while his motor skills are surging ahead. Today he reached for his sippy cup of water when he was thirsty (he usually just looks at it). He likes to watch our lips and repeat sounds back to us, although he doesn’t seem to attach meaning to any sounds yet. We got him to say “va-va-va” just by saying to him over and over. I think he might have said “bye-bye” this morning when John drove off to work. Dah-dah-dah and mah-mah-mah are still his favorite sounds, but he also still does a really cute whispered ta-ta-ta, especially in the morning when he’s just woken up. I’m doing some sign language with him, but I don’t know if that’s registering or not. I think he understands “no” and “that’s not for eating.” Valor will usually click his tongue at you if you click at him, kiss at you (sort of) if you kiss at him, and clap if you clap your hands.

We celebrated Valor’s new independence (and our nation’s older independence) with a new kiddie pool courtesy of Grandmommy Peg. John and I immediately realized the utility of such a device, minus the water, inside the house as a containment device. I am already trying to imagine how I can get the house packed and moved now that Valor is a man on the move.

On the night of the Fourth, John’s boss generously invited us to check out a new side of New Bern: the river side. We went out with his family in their boat to see the fireworks display over the Neuse River. It was wonderfully cool on the water, and a novel way to beat the event traffic. Valor was more excited about their dog than the boat ride; I’m not even sure he understood that we were on a boat. The rocking waves did make him sleepy, though, and he was out before the noise began.

Patient readers have endured my rambling about wealth management and Abby’s meditation on Dora and aging, and you are thinking: where is the main attraction? I will try to remedy this.

One of the fun things about the small town atmosphere is the variety of small town things to do. We already wrote about Fiddle Fest, and the Civil War battle reenactment. Last month, the nearby Cherry Point Marine Corps Air Station hosted an Air Show with the Blue Angels. We actually didn’t get to see the Blue Angels in flight (we got too sunburned out on the tarmac with the earlier performers) but we did see a stunt helicopter named “Otto,” Canadian skydivers, and an F-15 (pretty awesome piece of technology). And there were also things to enjoy on the ground, like Shockwave, a truck that goes from 0-300 miles per hour in 11 seconds, thanks to three jet engines behind the cab:

And to complement the picture we took with Valor and the Civil War actors, we made sure to get a shot of him with some modern-day soldiers. His name was pretty popular with this Navy medical team:

In addition to fun weekend outings, we’re in home-search mode. In fact, we’re currently in the midst of negotiating a price for the next House of Gjertsen. No sooner had we purposed to probably rent for a few more months, with the expectation that the housing market would continue to dip towards the end of the year, two things happened:

1. A police officer showed up at the door with a foreclosure notice on our rental house. Hard to imagine how the owner would let it foreclose with rent coming in, but that’s the reality. In all likelihood, whatever entity ends up owning the property in mid-August will probably be happy to keep us as renters, but it does throw a little bit of uncertainty into the process.
2. A house just came on the market in our target neighborhood that might just be the one.
   

I should back up—we’ve been casually looking at houses since we got here, and since my exam is behind me, we’ve been more seriously looking. The demand, especially in our price range, seems very low, but oddly it doesn’t seem to really be pushing the price down the way it seems like it should. But I’ve obviously just moved out of an environment where every other listing is a foreclosure, so it’s taken some adjustments to my mindset. Anyway, from the outset we targeted Trent Woods, an established, centrally-located municipality  that is 5 minutes from my workplace. Mostly the square feet we wanted has been out of our price range. But this one we just saw on Friday is on a very nice street, with cheaper utilities, and looks to be the right blend of “move-in-ready” and “fix-up projects to take on over time.”

So we put in an offer this morning, 8% below their asking price. And they’ve countered, dropping less than 2%. With it just hitting the market, they may not be that motivated to reduce their price. And it isn’t really a bad price where it stands. So I’m going to do a little more fine-tuned analysis of tax and insurance costs, borrowing costs (I found 4.5% fixed; pretty happy about that), and probably counter-offer on Monday. If it does work out, we’ll tell you all about the house in another post.

Oops, there I go again, writing about real estate when all anyone wants to hear about is Valorbug. Well, as I write this, he’s either teething (top two coming through) or having grandparent withdrawal, or both. Abby’s parents drove up from Tallahassee and spent a week with us. Grandma was very helpful in helping Valor stand and take steps forward while holding his hands.

We’re not sure if he’s going to crawl before walking or not—so far it’s still only backwards motion on his tummy. But Grandpa Warren made sure he put in his reps.

For my part, I’ve been training him to get around in other ways.