Moving a mobile home on the edge of the woods

 
I haven't forgotten that I promised you an announcement regarding my family. The good news is that God has led some people from my new church to take an interest in serving Jesus by helping my family. A person here, a person there... it has all added up to good things happening for my family.

It started with an elderly lady who had moved into an assisted living center several years ago. Someone told her we were living with friends and needed a home. She just happened to have a really old single wide mobile home that had been sitting for about five years while she had been in the assisted living center. To make a long story short, the mobile home now belongs to me and the boys. She gave it to us at no charge because she will never be going back home to it. And, because of it's age, she wouldn't have been able to get hardly any money for it.

So I now have a 1976 Deep South single wide mobile home. I have a home! It didn't come easily. All of the lady's stuff was still in it. So my friend Nancy, myself and another lady spent a couple of weeks going through everything in it. The lady went through and, with our help, separated everything into things she wanted to keep with her, things she couldn't part with and wanted to keep in storage, things she wanted other family members to have, and things she didn't care about.

Then, a week ago, we had a big yard sale with the stuff she didn't care about. She came and sat with us all day at the yard sale, and I'm happy to say she was able to take home almost $300. I took home a bad sunburn, lol, but I now had an empty trailer.

We immediately took my stuff out of storage to save on that bill and placed in it the trailer. Then we spent last week (Nancy and her husband, myself, and the lady's nephew) pulling out blocks, digging out the axle, replacing tires, cutting sewer lines and pipes, and removing tie downs. All in preparation to move the trailer to my little piece of land.

My son Justin watches as the men use a tractor to maneuver the mobile home out of the wooded area.

Yesterday the men in my Sunday School class got to talking, and four of them took a tractor over to the mobile home and managed to maneuver through the trees to the road. One of the guys has a friend who is licensed to move mobile homes, and he will come pick up the trailer and move it the 10 miles for us at no charge - maybe even today if he has time!

Huge pine trees have grown up around the home during the 30 years it sat there, and getting it out was quite a feat. At one point, it was wedged between a tree on each side. See the photos? They had to work and work to get it out - backing it up and pulling it forward inch by inch. We also ended up cutting down one of the pines to get it to the road.

I have never lived in a mobile home before, and I've never lived in any house this small before. But beggars can't be choosers and honestly, at this point, I just feel very thankful to finally be on my way to getting a home I can call my own again. We've been living with friends now for almost 10 months, and I am ready to call the shots about my own home again, lol. I figure with a little hard work and TLC, I can make any house into a home.

I am so thankful to now be living in this rural community. There's sort of an unspoken rule here: Everybody helps everybody as long as they are also willing to help themselves. When I lived in the city, we had one elderly couple next door that we tried to look out for, but other than that I couldn't even have hardly told you who my neighbors were.

I love living in the country, I really do. The only drawback is that jobs are so hard to find in rural areas, so please keep praying that I will find a job soon or I won't be able to pay the power bill at my new home!

Our new homestead will now have a home on it!