chops1sc

I had forgotten about this blog. I've never had anything like this before so it as easy to forget. So last time we spoke I had bought a "new" truck and I was learning the ropes of detailing. I also talked about having too many hobbies. Well, I still have those hobbies and I still rotate them every year (the gaming side has pretty much died off). And the laziness is making a real comeback...
The year I bought my truck (2015) was a very eventful one. It started off with me acting like a mechanic. Bought a new-to-me truck. Acquired a used camper. Found out we were expecting another baby. Wait, WHAT?!? That's right, around September my wife sent me a message at work with a picture of 5, yes 5 pregnancy tests. Each one showed a positive result. We gave up trying for kid #2 a few years ago! She was convinced that her Dr has put her back together wrong and it was just not going to happen. They say when you stop looking for something is when you find it, right? So here we are, 9 years after our daughter was born expecting our 2nd child. We were floating on cloud 9 and flying over the moon! We knew our small, 2-bedroom home was not going to cut it, so my wife started looking for a new place for our growing family. It didn't take long for her to find something. Here is the timeline; we find out she's pregnant on a Wednesday - She finds a house for us to look at Thursday - We go look at it on Friday - We put in our offer on Saturday - The offer is accepted on Monday. So not only were we going to be new parents (again), we were first-time homeowners! Oh, and there was a 1000-year flood.
 
That's right. In October there was a "perfect" storm brewing that led up to a 1000-year flood in South Carolina. I can remember that Sunday morning and stepping out of our old house and the water went up past my ankles. It was time to go. I told my daughter (9 at the time) to get a few of her favorite toys together while I gathered a few essentials of my own along with our dog. My wife is a night shift nurse and she was working that night. We carefully drove to her parent’s house after picking her up from the hospital. We would have been stranded if we didn’t leave when we did. There were some people that lost everything they had. We were very fortunate. While all of this was going on we were still in the middle of closing on the new house. It was almost a full week before I could even drive to the new place to see how much damage we were facing from the flood. We were relieved to find our new house and property to be completely safe from any water damage. You could barely tell it had even rained! The old house, on the other hand, wasn’t so fortunate.
 
I had been living in my grandparent’s old house since 2002 and my wife joined me after our marriage in 2003. Our daughter was born in 2006 and we were living in the house rent-free (we did pay the taxes and insurance). This living arrangement always made my wife uncomfortable. She was always waiting for the day my mother would kick us out and start renting the house for real money. I always reassured her that wasn’t going to happen, but I could tell she wanted a place to call her own. I loved the place. I had many memories there. We had a pool, a huge shop in the back. Most of the back yard was concrete and this made cleaning our cars & trucks a breeze! We looked into buying the house from my mom, but our financial situation didn’t allow it. This was a very hard pill to swallow and we just figured we would live there forever (I didn’t want to leave to be honest). It took a pregnancy and a 1000-year flood to get us out of that house, LOL!
 
To be continued….