I know we’ve been slacking writing about the progress of the house. I’ve been trying to catch up with the photo updates as much as possible, but just haven’t been good about writing. I’ll have to sit down one day (it’s hard these days when I feel like I’ve got 3 jobs!) and write about it all. But I just wanted to take a moment to write about a very pleasant experience that we had the other day.

Patrick and I were working at the house over the Christmas break. It was Tuesday the 26th and we’ve been working hard on scraping paint and the occasional window sash cord replacement. It had been fairly mild over the last few days, but that day was just rather unpleasantly cold. Of course our house does not have functioning heat yet, and in addition we’re missing some glass in the windows in a couple of places where the cold can sneak right on in. Our neighbors, also the president and vice president of the neighborhood association, had stopped by to look at the progress of the house. We chatted for a short while and showed them what had been done recently.

So then we kept working on the bathroom built-in, scraping the paint off and sanding it down. It’s quite a challenging and time consuming task, but it was details such as this built-in that sold us on the house. We had seen our share of bungalows, but most of them had been gutted to the studs with nothing spared. Our goal is to save and restore as many of these details as we possibly can, and even once we’ll be able to move in within the next month it will take us years to scrape through all that paint. In the end it should all be worth it.

And so we were working on this bathroom built-in. I had just told Patrick how my fingers were starting to feel numb and tingly because they were so frozen. I was thinking to myself that I didn’t know how much longer I’d be able to hold out before I’d have to say “I can’t work anymore.” Just after this there was a knock on the door. Patrick and I looked at each other and were wondering if it could be the house inspector. The inspector was supposed to possibly come that day, but we had been the only ones working on the house that day.

We walked to the door to be surprised again by our neighbor Scott, the vice president of the Westview Community Organization. He was holding a thermos and coffee mugs! He said that he thought we could probably need some warming up, asked us if we liked sugar and cream with our coffee. We said yes to both and he handed us a variety of sweeteners (regular sugar, Splenda, etc) and a bottle of cream.

I hope I didn’t come across as rude to him because I don’t think I was able to say much because I was quite speechless. Just moments before I was ready to give up working because I was frozen through and through when our wonderful neighbor came at the perfect moment with such an act of kindness.

This may not be Buckhead, or some other ritzy multi-million dollar neighborhood, but which neighborhood can you go to where your neighbor is so kind and brings you a coffee to warm up on a freezing day while you’re covered in dust and dirt and frozen to the bones. We felt like it was a moment out of a movie, because I’m just not sure these things happen very often in real life. It made Patrick and I realize that through all our house searching for months, all the various neighborhoods we looked at, despite our neighborhood needing some help, we couldn’t have picked a nicer place with nicer neighbors. I suppose it is a community that does need some rebuilding and recuperating where neighbors will stick together and work hard at what they’ve got.

So not only did we realize that we picked a great little location to live, but we were also able to warm up from the coffee and get some extra energy to keep working on the house for a few more hours.