Living Out Acts 2 Community

Well, this has been an eventful week! Our friends Dave and Holly and their son Jaden moved into our basement, their new apartment. They had just finished living on the Cornerstone University campus because Holly worked there and they lived in a dorm/apartment. We had been talking about the possibility of them coming to live with us for a while, because it would help them save up for their own house since we wouldn’t charge much rent. It will be a help to us too having a little extra income. It’s quite a radical thing to do, in this day and age when houses are getting so big and the families in them are getting smaller, sharing a “starter home” with another family is almost unheard of. But we are all about being abnormal, as there are a lot of things in our culture that we don’t agree with or do differently.

We had been working on finishing our basement this whole winter and spring. When we bought our house it was new and the basement was only framed in. I had heard that dry walling was a pain in the neck so we had our builder hang and finish the drywall, so it had been at that point for a couple years. Rebecca’s dad is a painter and general handyman, so he has been helping/doing most of the finishing, such as hanging the doors, putting up trim, molding, painting, etc. I installed a beautiful laminate floor, which was fun and now I can say that I at least did one major part of the finishing. Plus I added a closet in the bedroom so I did get to try my hand a dry walling. The last main part was the baseboard, which was finished on Friday, and just in the nick of time, too.

Later that night was when the real busyness began. Over the weekend we moved all their stuff in using the shop truck and a borrowed covered trailer, which worked out great. A few of their friends and family helped, which was awesome because it would have taken forever otherwise. The funny thing is that I underestimated how much stuff they had, and they underestimated the amount of room we have in our house for storage. So now, after a week of unpacking, things are looking great down there. It is apartment sized, and only lacks a kitchen, so they’ll be sharing ours upstairs. Amazingly there is still room for more storage, which we hopefully won’t need to use.

The last thing to do is finish the bathroom, it has a working shower but no toilet or vanity. That will be a project for tomorrow, and I’ll post some pictures of the whole experience then.

We’re exited to have new house-mates, we are great friends and I can only see that friendship deepening. This will be an interesting chapter in all of our lives, and I think one that will enrich our life experiences.