The Place of Becoming: Divinely Orchestrated Part 2

In 2016, we never planned to move out of our little apartment in Provo. It was three bedrooms, just large enough to accommodate six children - three boys and three girls. We had just been licensed as a foster care family suitable to care for one boy and one girl - bringing our total children to six.

It happened almost immediately after we became licensed, our landlady snapped. She refused to renew contract with any of the tenants who had more than two children. She hated children and she hated taking care of the apartments. It was her husband's project and he died suddenly from a heart attack just over a year before, leaving it all in her hands, which she resented. It didn't matter that we had lived there since June of 2008, she didn't want families living there with lots of kids.

Our family and two others were forced to find a new place to live within one month's time. It was like the earth crumbling beneath us. We loved our beautiful Provo neighborhood so much and we tried to stay as close as we possibly could. My friend, Jennifer, heard about our dilemma and informed me that a sister in her Stake Young Women's presidency had found out the exact same Friday that we did, she only had one month to sell her house because of her husband's new job in Idaho. Coincidence?

It all felt so crazy! We didn't have the money for a house - It would mean that our monthly living payment would almost double. Nevertheless, we felt we needed to take that leap of faith. Money could not be the issue, we had to go where we were meant to go.

Within less than two weeks of buying that house in our Stake, a woman came to my door in tears, sobbing and asking if we were licensed foster parents. I told her we were and invited her in. She talked for over an hour. She told me the story of a boy and girl whose parents had moved to our neighborhood from Wisconsin. Their parents joined the church just recently but had a drug problem and ended up both going to jail. The children, Brendon and Emily, were being bounced around to different ward families who would care for them but they couldn't do it for long. DCFS informed them the children would need to be placed in foster care with a licensed family - which would mean the children would be removed from the area. This was the only area they knew since moving to Utah, the ward knew them, they had already grown attached to the people. As soon as this woman found out we were foster parents, she ran to our house and begged us to make arrangements with DCFS to have Brendon and Emily come to our home so they didn't need to leave the neighborhood.

I knew in the moment, that this was the reason we needed to go to that very house, these children were meant to be part of our lives. Brendon and Emily moved into our home in October 2016, one month after we had bought the house. We didn't realize that DCFS paid foster families we honestly went into it with a strictly volunteer mindset, no payment involved. As long as the children belong to the State, the State pays for them. We were very surprised when the first check from DCFS came through, and it happened to be just enough to help us with their needs and with the mortgage. Brendon and Emily lived with us for seven months. Their parents were released from Jail in the summer of 2017 and they were able to return back home with them.

We bought Brendon and Emily bikes right after they moved in and took them to our Ward building to ride them. Brendon didn't have much experience with a bike before living with us and he loved it!

Exactly one year after we had Brendon and Emily..... Amillia came into our lives Oct. 2017. Amillia's parents didn't have parental rights and she didn't have the option of being able to go back home to them like Brendon and Emily did. We ended up adopting Amillia in June of 2018.

......................................

After living in our Provo home for two-and-a-half years, we felt unsettled. We were glad to be in the same Stake but the west side of University Avenue felt so extremely different than the east side. It was strange, just being a few blocks away from our old apartment, yet it was a stark contrast, it felt unsafe, drug dealing was constant on our street corner where the 711 was. Drunks and drug addicts were constantly walking in front of our home. When it rained, hypodermic needles would wash up into our driveway. No joke.

We were glad to have a home but it was definitely not the kind of neighborhood we wanted to retire in. It was also very transient, the BYU students moved in and out of the apartments so frequently, it was hard to feel established. More than half our ward would change to brand new faces every six months. At first, I loved it, I loved meeting new people... but I really longed to have an area more settled. We were ready to go.... It was also helpful the housing market rose enough in those 2.5 years to make a good down-payment for a different home.

We began searching, praying that God would guide us to a place Joseph and I both felt good about. I thought for starters, we should search for a neighborhood that had very low crime activity. We zoomed in on an area in walking distance just south west of Joseph's work that had almost no crime. It looked like there was mostly homes, no apartments (which meant less transient too). We got in the car and decided to drive through it. We drove all around it - everything felt beautiful. A couple times after that, Joseph drove through it on his way home from work.... he was awestruck. He felt something so good about the area, "and I never feel anything, Alicia!" he said. Well, it was settled,we just needed to find a home for sale there.

And we did find a home as I explained in my last post!! It was miraculous how it all came together, truly miraculous! I'm so glad our landlady kicked us out in 2016. It led us to the foster children we were meant to have (we still see Brendon and Emily quite often). Being forced to move was the springboard to get us into this home here. That home in Provo proved to give us some nice equity. It also taught us what we were looking for in a neighborhood. We are in a better place now, it's more established with good strong families who have been here for decades, it's a safer neighborhood, we have a beautiful yard, we are able to generate more income through our rental, all our children are thriving here. It's better in every possible way! I'm so glad God is in the details.

These are pictures of the basement we gutted to make it into an apartment.

It had this awesome red carpet puked up all over the floors, walls, and doors... yes doors too.

Not all the doors had carpet... some had this awesome wood paneling.

We set the kids completely loose with the sledge hammers. It could have probably been done in a more organized manner.... but where's the fun in that?!

Now here are the completed pics... well, mostly completed.

Our renters moved in so fast, we didn't even have kitchen counters yet. They loved the apartment so much, they didn't care. (Besides, it was their brother doing the construction so they knew the counters would come soon enough.) I didn't get snap shots of the completed basement before they moved in, I only took video but you can still get a good idea of what it looks like. We made much of the design match our upstairs.

This is the apartment kitchen. You can't see it but to the right of the door there is a full laundry room. This basement did not originally have a kitchen, it's something we installed.

The lighting is nice in this basement because all the windows were quite large when the home was originally built so when we put in new windows, we didn't need to cut into the concrete. We also installed tons of recessed led lights on dimmer switches

I love this gas fireplace we decided to put in the living-room.

Living-room looking into one of the bedrooms.

Our basement apartment has two bedrooms and one full bath. The door to the right just before the bathroom is the second bedroom. I don't have a picture of the second bedroom but it also has some ship-lap on one of the walls to match the design around the fireplace.

You can get an idea of the lighting we installed throughout the apartment from this picture below. This is the small portion of the basement we kept for ourselves. On the other side of Micah's bedroom is our laundry room.