A memorable Memorial Day

For two years now we've been hard at work on The House of Goodwill, trying to get it painted, furnished, and set up as an airbnb.  It's been such a longer project than we anticipated, and it's taken tons of work.  But we set a deadline of Memorial Day weekend to get the bulk of the work on the house completed.  And we did.

We worked until 10pm on Friday night, but we did.

And just to ensure that it was done by then, we planned a big party outside with all our neighbors, and promised house tours.  

My son and I stopped at every house on our street (and a few others) knocking on doors and inviting people to come to a catered barbeque both Saturday and Sunday afternoon.  Most of our neighbors we had never met before (and didn't know their names); it was something we really enjoyed!

Here are some photos of our weekend event:

We had twenty-two friends and neighbors show up between Saturday and Sunday.

We had perfect weather - not too hot, which is unusual for Memorial Day weekend in Tennessee.

We had rain all week, so I was SO happy the sky was clear!

So it turns out, we have some really amazing neighbors here!

We found out lots of them like to play games...so we've got some more future parties in the pipeline.

We had a beanbag tournament on Saturday...

...and here are the winners!  Gift cards and this t-shirt were the prizes.

Here we our in our official t-shirts of the weekend.

My son and I are on the left, my sister-in-law Linda (who came to help host) is on the right.

My new friend Angela (who I met the day before - she lives two houses away) is standing next to me.

She and her husband joined us on their first wedding anniversary, so she was the automatic prize winner of the excellent WalMart Patriotic cat shirt on Sunday.

(She brought champagne, too!)

All the neighbors on both days wanted to see our work on the house.

I've never had this many people in my bedroom before.

It was an interesting moment.

We got to try out our game table in the basement for the first time!

(It's an awesome table - I found it and all four chairs on craigslist for $100.)

We also used our firepit for the first time!

(We got it free from a neighbor who was upgrading, and my son gave it a fresh coat of high heat paint.)

Our friends let us use their pontoon boat on Monday; it was the first time we spent a whole day on the lake in a boat.  Fun!

So what's left before our first guests show up to rent the house in a little less than a month?

Well, first a day off.  (Today.)  Today's the first day in a long time that I didn't have to get up early and clean or paint something.

Our shoreline project is not finished.  Our contractor ran into problems when rain pushed the land toward the wall he was building and breached it.  So there was no sand beach by Memorial Day weekend, though there are huge sand piles in corners of our yard.

Right now we're waiting to hear back from our contractor regarding Plan B and the cost.

We also need to set the house up online as an airbnb, hang a few more things on the walls, change out some door locks and add some security cameras.  I'll get started on that tomorrow.

But today we're just feeling grateful for all we've been blessed with; we're enjoying the (mostly) finished house (that's also as clean as it's ever going to be) and enjoying the refrigerators overflowing with leftover food,

It was a hard-earned celebration and we enjoyed every minute of it!