What have you been working on?

Organizing and purging. I always say that but it’s true. We sold our home in the north Tampa area and moved to the panhandle in 2022. We ended up renting 2 places that year. It was only supposed to be for a few months until we bought a house, but my brother ended up passing away 2 weeks later unexpectedly. I ended up inheriting his home and property, so everything kind of went off the rails. We ended up in an Airbnb for 5 months and then a rental house for 6.

It took almost a year to find a house to buy in this area, and we acquired so much STUFF in the mean time. When we sold our house we stored everything in 2 giant Pods and it never occurred to us that we wouldn’t see that stuff for a year.

Literally everything we needed to live was in those pods 8 hours away, so we had to buy everything we needed. Btw, you can’t get anything out of pods until they’re delivered and we didn’t own a home to have them delivered to. We initially were just going to stay at Gary’s mom’s until we found a house, but it was so cramped that we had to find an Airbnb. We needed new clothing when it got cold, shoes, pots and pans, pillows, toiletries, blankets, toys, hair tools, gaming systems, a Christmas tree (we couldn’t go without a tree), TV’s, ornaments and seasonal decorations, household cleaning items, vacuums, mops, brooms…etc. We had to pretty much start over and the kids were so upset about not having their toys and their things.

So now we have like 2 or 3 of everything and basically have all my mom’s and Jay’s belongings too! It’s just overwhelming and emotional to go through.

It was a pretty crazy time and no one will ever understand the chaos of my brother passing unexpectedly. It literally spun our lives out of control. Repairing his house to sell, trying to get all of his estate handled while trying to homeschool kids and find our own home was an exhausting process and endless chaos and costs with attorneys etc. Paying 2800$ for our rent + bills every month and his 1300$ mortgage and his electric and water bill for a year until we sold his house. It was a lot. Thank goodness our vehicles are all paid off and I was able to pay off his truck (he had 2 payments left) because that was an expensive, scary and exhausting year of living for us. 2022 kicked our butts.

Thankfully we made enough on his home to cover all of those repairs and bills and then some. I know that God restored everything we lost in that time, and he has been so good to us, but we are still trying to sort through it physically and emotionally, one day at a time. We’ve been able to donate and give away a lot of things that I know have helped a lot of people, and I hope we can eventually have a cleared out attic. 👏🏼