Goodbye, Laird Park House

Beginning in about February I had a nagging feeling that we were going to be moving. It had me looking at real estate sites constantly (not that unusual, actually) and pestering Clint about his career plans. And we thought maybe we should move since Talmage was transitioning to Middle School. But we ultimately decided to stay put. Then the last week in May we emailed our landlords in London (we thought) just to verify that we would be able to rent the house for a fourth year. We didn't hear back from them for a week and I was really stressing out. Then we heard from them and learned that he had left his high-paying job in London a year before and his family was living in a condo in Provo so they could afford to cover the $1,000 they were losing every month on the rental because they had bought it at the top of the market. They had just felt obligated to rent it to us for the full three years because that was the original understanding, although there was no three year contract. They said we could stay in the house, but they'd have to raise the rent $1,000 a month. It took me less than 24 hours to email everyone I knew in Salt Lake and find another rental house only 4 blocks away. It was still walking distance to our school and church and friends, but it was coming open in five days, on June 1st. I figured if the landlord wanted to sell the house, he'd probably appreciate it being empty at the first of the summer instead of August 1st when our contract ended. He agreed. And WE MOVED!!! Aahh! Most of the pain is gone now, but we haven't moved ourselves since Talmage was a baby. We've since added an entire wood shop and a LOT a LOT of stuff! We didn't acutally move ourselves though, we had tons of help from friends and family. Almost everyone we know came over at some point to help. But the Hale clan were really supreme. Chad lent us his trailer and he was there multiple days. At the end of one very long day I was so exhausted and my knees and hips hurt so much I stayed at the new house moving in and my sisters stayed at my old house until midnight cleaning!! Can you beleive that? It's the nicest thing anyone has ever done for me. Clint worked harder and longer than me, for a good two weeks. He was really a trouper and he showed his organizational genius squeezing all our stuff into a house 1,000 square feet smaller. And did I mention he had to put his entire shop in storage. That was a lot of sacrifice just to stay in the neighborhood and avoid the kids having to make too much of a transition. We are actually living in another stake now even though we are even closer to our ward building than before, but we are still attending our same ward.

I took these pictures for our landlord, so he could list the house. Man that made me grumpy! But they really were generous with us.

The side yard. The week we left I spent about 8 hours on this baby clearing leaves and fighting ivy, etc.