Moving

Well the year started out with fantastic news, I was pregnant. Baby due toward the end of September.  Adam decided that he wanted to start full time theology studies which would also start toward the end of September. As a result we took the decision to move off the farm and move to a smaller house (hence smaller mortgage). Of course it was the worst time to sell the property, in the middle of the recession and the estate agent said it would not sell for at least a year!

God was incredibly good and provided a buyer for the property within 3 months of us putting it on the market. It was so sad to say goodbye to North Ballaird. We had had 3 fantastic years there and it had really been our dream. However our dream is not God's dream for us and we are finding great joy in serving Him no matter the sacrifice. 

The move was horrific. Never move when you are 8 months pregnant. I am so suprised that the baby went to term. I was doing really stupid things like lifting heavy boxes, climbing up ladders and working through the night just to get us all packed, moved and settled. Adam was just as busy, No busier, and on top of everything on our main moving weekend he got the flu of all flu's, I thought I would be husbandless by the end of the weekend.  Again God showed his faithfulness in that we were moved and settled a month before the baby arrived. 

We bought our new house in a small village half an hour from the farm in February. It needed lots of work and we spent a fair amount of time trying to get it all ready  before we moved. We managed to get the bedrooms sorted and the lounge, but there is still a fair amount to do in the entrance hall and dinning room. The work on the house was interupted  by the arrival of Daniel Adam Oellermann. Our little boy arrived 5 days early. We had to stop on the way to the hospital to get diesel but thats another story. 

Daniel is a very good little boy and at 11 weeks has sleep through the night for the last two nights. Not sure if this is a trend which will continue but I am enjoying it while it lasts. 

Well it is Christmas in less than 20 days and we still have all the preparations to organise but I am looking forward to celebration the birth of the Lord Jesus Christ  and looking back over a year where we can seeHis hand so obviously at work in our lives.

It's been a long while since I've blogged, but I have an excellent excuse. Michelle and I have moved house! North Ballaird was our dream home, the little smallholding in the country, but God has been calling us on to greater things. This includes me going back to University to study full-time to become a pastor. We are both very excited about this new phase in our lives, and selling North Ballaird was an enabling step which reduced the size of our budget considerably. We bought a three-bedroom semi detached in Dailly, a lovely little place with decent-sized rooms and high ceilings (built in the 40s) but in a terrible state. We have been sanding and skimming and painting and flooring and everthying else that might be needed to sort out a house, and ultimately have got it mostly done. We still need to  do the entrance, staircase and dining-room... and unfortunately we weren't able to get finished before we moved, so the dining-room furniture is packed into the lounge, and enormous piles of boxes are packed into the dining-room! Having moved from the farm, we have large quantities of generators, power tools, timber and other useful stuff from the outbuildings - and really nowhere to put it (the new place has no garage). So we've piled it in the dining room.

 But here's the plan: this morning I finished spraying the roof timbers with boron (to kill off the light woodworm infestation the surveyor picked up before it gets out of hand). This was an appalling job, and ended up taking about 10-12 hours to do (more if you include clearing the old fibreglass insulation, which was even worse) - thankfully there was only about an hour and a half left to do today. It's done properly, and the woodworms won't think much of the accommodation now. Next is to insulate at the roofline with spray-foam insulation; this will prevent the loft from getting damp, further cramping the style of the woodworm. I also have to strengthen the ceiling joists so that we can put loftboards down and shift all the dining-room piles into their long-term storage in the loft. While I'm up there I'll put some lights into the loft, and PIR-activated security spotlights for the front and back of the house. 

That will put us in a position to fix up the walls in the dining room, paint, lay laminate flooring, move the furniture in from the living room. That will give us room to breathe, but we'll still be against the clock to get the last bits done - as our baby is due on 24 September, and I'm starting at Scottish Baptist College on the 21st!

Exciting, frenetic times - but we know that God will see us through them!