True Blessing

Here's some honest confession for you: Our house keeps us poor.

Okay, so not poor, but it seems to take every spare bit of cash we have. There's a lot we don't do, such as take vacations, because we just can't afford to. If you've been following our blog for the past year, you'll know some of what I'm talking about. Between repairing leaks under our house (which involved temporarily moving out), having a fully-grown tree fall in the front yard, and having our roof and gutters replaced after a massive hail storm, we just haven't had any extra cash for more interesting endeavors.

And actually, the gutter saga, which I don't believe I've mentioned here, continued on today. But in a very, very good way.

We were told that we had some rotted spots that would need to be fixed before they could hang the gutters on our house. Steven planned to fix that himself, and he was going to try to get it done in the 2 weeks before we were to leave for youth camp. (This was back in July.) We'd told our contact at the roofing company that they were not to install our gutters until we let them know we were ready.

So what happened? Steven wasn't able to finish before we left for camp. In fact, he felt a bit in over his head on the project, and he'd left a message for the roofing company to get an estimate on having them fix it. We left for youth camp, and when I called one of the catsitters to check on my boys, she told me that the gutter guys showed up while she was at our house and were hanging our new gutters. *sigh*

The new gutters looked great, but they were hanging over partially messed-up corners. And one of the downspouts was lying in the grass. It took until today (we're talking about 2.5 months later!) for this to get sorted out. Someone came over early to start pulling down our gutters, then someone else came over to fix the rotted corners:



I was worried because I still hadn't heard an estimate on the cost of this. I called the company, and I received a call back from the owner himself. Y'all, he's pretty much taking care of this himself. He acknowledged that this was his mistake, so we're only paying for the cost of the wood and some of the labor. We're talking only about $125 out of our pockets! Truly, this is a blessing, as we've had thousands of dollars slipping through our fingers in the past year. Frankly, we're trying to recover financially from all of the massive repairs, so this was very good news.

And as I'd been praying about this, it's definitely a positive answer from the Lord!