Our first day.
Here we are filming a walk-through of the house before the demolition began.
The end of a long day -- closing day, June 12, 2009.
The next morning we returned to find this beautiful yellow rose... may seem random, but I remember being very fond of this rose.
The demolition.
Countless hours and hours of hard work and blood, sweat. and tears (although that is an expression, I mean it very literally)
The wall that defeated me over and over again.
Every "plan" I had for this wall never seemed to work. Particularly because of the the amount of "stuff" in it. To me, this picture seems to capture that frustration quite well. I learned my first hard lesson in home remodeling with this wall...be flexible.
Dumpster after dumpster of trash.
And it wouldn't have been complete without putting my dad's services to work, too. Wouldn't want to have made him feel left out.
Putting it all back together...and I thought tearing it all out was hard.
Our all day paint-a-thon.
I really cracked the whip this day and I'm lucky anyone came back after this. But we had a great team of painters and within the day, we painted the entire house.
The day our flooring arrived.
I was by no means expecting a semi to pull up to our house to drop it off. To cover the entire house, it was a lot!
The amount of work we put into these floors.
I can't even begin to explain how much work the floors were. John was the MVP - nailing in just about every single board. The rest of us lined it up, cut it and cheered him on. Once that was done, the cleaning, sanding, more cleaning, staining, more cleaning, more sanding, and Mom's favorite job, applying polyurethane.
Caught sleeping on the job.
Finishing the back patio.
While the boys were working on something we couldn't help with, Mom and I spent the weekend fixing up the patio. And given that we had the whole weekend (back then, it felt like soooooo much time!), we really went above and beyond.
Moving in. Home sweet home.
Particularly, trying every way possible to get the couch upstairs. It was equally entertaining and also frightening that someone was going to end up hurt. In the end, the couch stayed downstairs and everyone was okay.
And of course, once we were in, countless parties, holidays, football games on TV, home cooked meals, lazy days, and everything else that makes a house a home.
One great birthday to remember was our "Let Them Eat Cake" cake tasting party. For my birthday, I invited my family and friends over to sample our wedding cake options and vote for the favorite.
This is a picture of us the day before our wedding at our golf outing. I'm including it because the evening of this picture is a stand-out memory for John. What started as "a few friends coming over to hang out and relax" before the Big Day turned into a house full of people and a great time. Resting up and staying overnight at my parent's house, I was clueless this was happening until I was told about it later.
Greenbriar will always hold a special place in our hearts because its where we came home together for the first time as Mr. and Mrs. Cicci.
John's graduation from Firefighters Academy.
After weeks and weeks of hard work and hours upon hours of studying late into the night, I was very proud of John this night. He makes a great fireman.
This is a memorable part of Greenbriar because it was during his training that we found out we were pregnant with our first baby. The week before I had a routine check-up with my general practitioner. I had to have some blood work ran so I nervously asked her if she minded adding a pregnancy test, too. The at-home tests wouldn't work for about a week, but a blood test would. Much to our disappointment, the test came back negative. A week or so passes and I wasn't convinced I wasn't pregnant. I woke up early on a Saturday and took a test and it was positive. I ran into our bedroom to wake up John -- confused, trying not to get too excited, and just really confused. Blood tests are supposed to be way more accurate than at-home tests, so what was the deal?! I had to wait until Monday to go to my doctor. He called me about 4:00 that afternoon to tell me that I was in fact pregnant. John was in training and couldn't take calls unless for an emergency so I waited anxiously for 5:00. I even left work early so I could go to the grocery store and make a nice dinner for John and I to celebrate before he had to get to studying. 5:30 comes around, 6:00 and no John...he had never been later than 5:15 and it wasn't like him to not call me if he was going to be home late or something came up. I called him only to hear his cell phone ringing upstairs. He forgot his phone, of all days. 6:30, 6:45...I'm on the phone with LeeAnn. We talk ourselves into complete worry. We were minutes away from sending out a search party. Did I mention this was all during an awful thunderstorm?? I went down the list of the other rookies and called the first few...no one answered. Finally, after what felt like an eternity, one of them called me back around 7:15. There had been a pretty big fire and they decided to have the rookies help clean it up and the equipment and that they were on their way home now. John, not having his phone, couldn't call me on the way there to let me know (and he couldn't exactly have gotten on site and said he'd be right there after he borrowed someone's phone to make a phone call). Needless to say, I had never been so relieved. Here I was sitting in front of a cold dinner and a bottle of sparkling grape juice, convinced I was a widowed mother...all for being 2 hours late while I was sitting on the biggest news I'd have ever had to tell him :)
Sidetracked...back to my list...
Getting the nursery put together.
The night we had our parents over for dinner to tell them we were having a boy and his name would be 'Rudy'
Unloading and putting together all of this.
And the greatest of all the moments, bringing home this perfect baby boy.
While I could go on and on and on about all of our favorite memories since Rudy has been a part of Greenbriar, I think this entire blog thus far sums them up enough.
It is with a very heavy heart that I say good-bye to this house that has meant so much to me. John keeps reminding me that its not the house, but the people in it, that make it so great. And while I know that to be 100% true, I can't help but shed a tear (or two, or three, or four, or...a lot) for the house we called home during such great times of our lives. To say these years have been happy and blessed would be an understatement. I pray the next house and the next chapter brings just as much joy and love as our stay here at Greenbriar has.
