Count Your Many Blessings

You don't always see your blessings until you look back. I am surprized how many blessings have come just from our pipes braking while we were in Utah for Christmas.

1.) The insurance is not only reimbursing us for the hotel that we will have been in for a month, but also some eating out expenses!

2.) When we moved into our house, the carpet had holes in most of the door frame areas from pets of previous owners. We asked them to replace the carpet before we bought the house, but they counter offered with $1000 credit. Not enough to recarpet, so we didn't, but took the credit and bought the house anyway. Now all the carpet in our livingroom needs to be replaced from the water damage, and since building materials are so cheap with the economy the way it is, we are able to recarpet the entire house!

3.) The insurance inspector and our contractor agreed on a very good price for us to be paid to put our house back together, so everything plus some will be covered!

4.) Lisa had painted the stripes in the kitchen, and wants to repaint again herself, so that is saving us $800 instead of paying someone, which the insurance included in what they're paying us.

5.) We have wanted to learn how to tile a floor, so we decided to tile the bathroom floor ourselves, which saved us more money.

6.) We paid just over $1000 for pergo wood flooring from Costco for our kitchen to put in ourselves, which subtracting the cost of the flooring we bought from what the flooring guy quoted us, we're still saving $2600 doing it ourselves!!

7.) The extra money we're saving will easily pay off our $500 deductible, and the $600 we had to pay out of pocket for the plumbing.

8.) We now have nice new AquaPEX plumbing in the kitchen, which actually expands when it freezes so it won't break!

9.) Since we're saving so much money doing the flooring and painting ourselves, we're getting a granite slab countertop in the kitchen!!

10.) We have such great neighbors and friends that have had us over for meals almost every day.

11.) The insurance is covering everything, which in itself is helping out a lot of the people who are putting our house back together, who are struggling and needed this extra work during such a hard economic time.

12.) It couldn't have come at a better time, because even though we had to come home from Utah a week early, the drive was amazing for wintertime, with no weather troubles at all, and a lot of Washington flooded right after we got home! We most likely wouldn't have made it home if we had tried coming back a week later when we had planned!! All the pictures below are exactly where we were driving when we came back from Utah (except for the waterfall which I included to also show the extent of the flooding, and some of you have seen it in person, so you can see how much extra water there is).

I could go on and on about all the ways God has blessed us just from this one "tragedy" of our pipe breaking and flooding our house. I'll just say that no matter what happens in this life, or how much it seems like we're in the "refiner's fire", we can know that we're never alone. God is watching over us, and the blessings are on their way, or even hidden within the problem itself!

What Snoqualmie Falls looks like most of the time

What the falls looked like during the flooding!