Count your blessings...

I know my last post was kind of long, I didn't realize how many things I had written down until I read the whole thing. Well I was thinking about all the bad luck and then decided to concentrate on one of the good things that has happened to our little family.
8 years ago Dan, Shayna, Victor and I were living in a little two bedroom apartment in West Virginia when we got a phone call from Dan's mom, she told us about the possibility of buying a town house in VA. That phone call changed our lives forever. Dan had told me in the past that we would never afford to buy a house and I honestly didn't think we would, although I really wanted to buy one. Dan got a raise a little after that phone call and we were able to get approved for a loan. We only saw the house once on the inside and maybe twice on the outside. It was a complete mess and very old but Dan and I were able to see endless possibilities, if there is something I have learned in this life is that you should never be picky. Like everything else we do in our lives, we packed our little apartment and drove to VA on the day of the closing date October 30Th(Dan's birthday). We closed on the house, got the keys and headed straight for our new home. It was raining and dark and cold, my in laws offered us to spend the night at their place but we insisted to stay. After the first day we realized that the house was going to need a lot of work, the AC was dead, the furnace was from 1976 and had to be on 90 the whole time or it would turn off, the only full bathroom was a huge mess and the floor was caving in from water damage. We managed to survive the first year before we could start making improvements. The bathroom was the first thing, then the next year we got rid of the carpet, we got new siding, new roof, new windows and painted the entire second level. New opportunities opened up for us and after visiting Utah during our vacation in 2005 we decided to sell at what seemed to be the best time. Our house sold 4 days after we put it on the market, we got more than 3 times of what we paid for it and again just packed our lives away and moved to Utah, the best part about that was the driving almost across the United States. Those were fun days. In order to move I had to get rid of a lot of furniture and stuff but it felt really good to give our stuff to a family who needed it. Dan also gave away his car to his niece, that seems to be our tradition with every move. That is one of the things that I admire a lot about Dan, he is a very giving person and I love him for that. So now you know the story about how we ended up living in Utah. For me the entire experience of buying the townhouse is one of the biggest blessing we have had as a family and I know that ending up in Texas somehow is going to bring a lot more blessings that we could not have been able to get before. I am very grateful for what I have and I do count my blessings :)
Sadly the townhouse is a foreclosure now, since the family that bought it pay way too much money for it and the economy is so bad. My brother in Law who still lives across the street from my townhouse took pictures of it and I can recognize that the big pile of trash there is what used to be my kitchen. I painted the cabinets black to give the kitchen a new look (I liked it). The stove that we bought when we first moved in is there too, how sad :( My sister in Law call me to tell me about the stove and that it was just sitting there and we were all sad since she took me shopping for it. You can still see the security latch thing on the side of the oven door. So here is a picture of our first house.