College Station, Texas!!

Yeehaw! We made it. Thank you for all of your prayers. We pulled into College Station at about 1:30 this afternoon. Last night, we decided to leave El Paso at 2:00am, so that the majority of the drive would occur while the girls slept. It worked. They didn't stir until we reached Fredericksburg (the peach capital of Texas, even though I didn't see a single peach tree!) at about 10:30. We stopped at a little coffee shop that served breakfast, and switched so that I could drive and Tanner could relax. We finished the rest of the trip in less than 3 1/2 hours. Hehehe...

Perhaps you're wondering how Tanner managed to drive for so long without falling asleep? We discovered the beauty of RockStar energy drink. :-)

So, we decided to go straight to our house. We wanted to know exactly what we were dealing with. The maps all say that the house is located on the corner of Texas Ave, and as we pulled onto the street our hearts skipped a few beats. There was this dilapidated, white house on the corner. We could see it leaning. We could see THROUGH it. Wait, I thought, the house is blue. It's blue. Whew! Aaahh...there it is. We pulled into the little drive and peered through the windows as we waited for the realtor. Kate started to cry, "Mommy, I DON'T like this house. It's icky." But then, once we were inside the house, she was immediately reconciled to it because the front door has a chain lock on it.

What she didn't know was that we met two neighbors inside our house. A dead one and a live one: cockaroaches. Uugghh. We have to go buy toothbrush covers. We are happy to think of Terminix coming tomorrow.

We measured the windows and doors, the outside of the house and the opening in the fence. We figured out where to put the refrigerator, and discovered that there are no washer/dryer hookups. We think we have to replace the water heater, the roof and all of the siding on the house. We're not sure about the heater yet. Then we checked into our hotel and took a little break so that we could come up with a game plan. Then we went to Home Depot and bought paint, a plaster repair kit, a tub repair kit, caulking, and ordered the carpet, the new windows and figured out what exterior doors to buy.

According to the guy at Home Depot, it's not a smart thing to buy solid core, wood doors in Texas. He said that the wood would expand and contract because of all of the humidity, plus it would tend to rot out at the bottom during the wet season. He suggested either a steel or fiberglass door. Interesting, huh?

It looks like we'll need to stay in this hotel for at least a week, and we need to buy a truck. We also need to sleep. G'night.