DONE! (And we've come so far...)

Okay...so we're not really done.  But we're close enough that I feel like I can say "Done!"  What's left?  Well, as I sit here typing Patrick is putting up the baseboards in the LAST ROOM, which I painted this morning.  The wood floor for my scrapbooking room is coming on Monday.  We need to put the vanity in the bathroom and get the tub surround and sink in.  And we need doorknobs. Tomorrow I will finish filling in nail holes on all the moulding, caulk and touch up the paint on said woodwork and then we will be ready for CARPET.  YAY!
There is no adequate way to express how completely exciting this is without a background story of how FAR we have come....It's been a long road...but I think being able to look back at the struggle only makes it that much better.  Who doesn't love to see progress?
Eighteen years ago, before Braden was born, Patrick and I lived in a nice but small two bedroom apartment, which suited our needs just dandy at the time.  Then came Braden...and a beautiful, fat, manila envelope with a hospital bill for over $50,000 (yeah...my health insurance had been canceled without my knowledge by my scumbag employer...but that's a story for another day)...then another bill from another hospital...then another bill from Life Flight...it was ugly.  Because Braden required so much care, there would be no going back to work for me, and Patrick was working part time and going to school.  He dropped out of school and went to work full time, but the bills kept on coming.  By the time Christmas came, the money was gone...not even one dime for presents or a tree. My parents gave us a little money and we went and got this dinky Charlie Brown Christmas tree at the last minute.  Patrick, who was working in the gift shop at Snowbird, got a bunch of little gift shop stuff at a discount and filled one of his ski socks for me for Christmas.  I didn't get him anything.  But somehow we managed.
Then came kid #2...then kid #3...and we were still in that dinky apartment. We were happy but crowded.  We had so much stuff we had to pile it all on our bed during the day so we could walk around, then move it to the floor at night so we could sleep.  The boys' room was wall to wall cribs and totes of storage stuff.  Ugh.  The idea that we would ever have our own house was fleeting.
Then, like a miracle, a postcard came from a good friend who was doing mortgages.  I decided to call her and see just what it would take to get us into a house...even though Patrick thought I was crazy to try.  My wonderful friend guaranteed that she would do whatever it took to get us in a house...and she DID IT!  And we moved into our first house....where we stayed for four years.
That house was awesome and the amount of space we had was amazing.  The backyard was huge, with a giant shade tree that shaded the entire yard.  The basement was newly finished and I even had a laundry chute that sent the dirty clothes right into the basement laundry room.  But the house was old too, and way too far from Patrick's work to be practical.  The toilet leaned to the side when you sat on it and I worried that one day I'd just fall through to the basement.  And there were no heating vents in the family room (a little surprise we discovered when winter hit).  But we really loved that house...especially because it springboarded us into the house we're in now.
And we've been here for nine years.  Sometimes I forget those hard times and I find myself complaining about this or that..."I wish there was more cupboard space in the kitchen"...or..."those poor boys are all stuffed in one room"...or..."all Braden's stuff takes up too much space"...or...my favorite..."I wish we had a third garage!"  It's those times when I need to remember to be grateful that we have so much.  Yes, we've been working on the basement for what seems an eternity...(considering when we bought the house we had grandiose plans to finish it that first year) but now that it's done, we really have something to be proud of.  We did almost all the work ourselves, and we did it without borrowing money.  That's quite an accomplishment.  So in two weeks when I am sitting down there on my NEW sofa (yes, we bought a really great couch the other day) staring at a blank (although fabulously painted) wall because we can't go buy the big TV we want just yet, maybe what I really need is a home movie of that dinky apartment.  Then I can look around at all those blank walls and empty space and smile.