Two Years Later...

Two years ago today we were driving from Coeur d'Alene to our new place in Provo. In honor of this momentous day I have compiled a list of our first memories and impressions of our new, now old home.
-We got into Provo at about 8:00 pm and went straight to our new place to check it out. We had only seen it for about 5 minutes on our walk-through the first time and we were anxious to see it again. This was when our first problem occurred. We walked in our front door and tried to turn the lights on in our dark apartment, nothing happened. We knew that we had called the power company but we were worried they had forgotten or something because we had no electricity. Grant felt his way around the dark apartment and found the breaker box. It turned out that all of the breakers had been switched off. We flipped them all and had light. Small victory #1!
-Once we had light we decided to check out the apartment. We quickly realized that maybe we should have kept the lights turned off. When we signed our lease we had asked for fresh paint and cleaned carpets. Neither of these had been done, we quickly realized that our landlord might be a slacker. We were becoming very depressed very quickly. Grant went straight for the fridge out of habit and came right back saying that we should get out of this place FAST! The fridge had rotten food due to not being cleaned out and then having the power turned off. We needed to leave, get some dinner, buy some cleaning supplies and gear up for a night of cleaning.
-We went to Mimi's, a restaurant in town and tried to relax over dinner. Grant was so upset he couldn't even eat his food. We left the restaurant and went to the store to buy cleaning supplies, why postpone the inevitable?
-And the cleaning began, or continued. We had already cleaned our old apartment for 2 days straight, then drove 12 hours , ate dinner, and then started cleaning some more. Grant got to work on the fridge and I started on the bathroom.
- We then got a little ray of hope, one of our neighbors stopped by to say hello. We were so happy that at least if our new place was a dump we had nice neighbors to maybe even things out. He asked us how the move was going, told us if we need help when our stuff got here to let him know, and then quickly left and didn't talk to us for another 6 months. We hadn't realized when we were talking to him that he lived in our apartment before us and we made a few comments when he stopped by about how bummed we were that our apartment was disgusting. They were embarrassed that we thought they left the apartment a mess, and we were embarrassed that we had told them this. It took a while to get past the awkwardness, but we did and now consider them some of our best friends
-My parents showed up the same night as us and helped with the cleaning. The next day we bought a washer and dryer, cleaned some more, and ran errands. After all of this I decided it was time to take a shower and quickly realized we had no hot water. The hot water heater had been set to vacation mode and we had to wait a few hours for it to heat up. It was the best shower of my life once I finally did get to take it.
- Matt and Sue in the mean time were on the road driving our furniture to us at a the rapid speed of 55 mph. We are still so grateful they did that for us, I think it took them something like 15/16 hours to get down here.
- They arrived late the night after us, and helped us unload. We also had a set of neighbors come out and helped us unload everything in the truck until it was empty. I am still amazed at their generosity and kindness to complete strangers.

We eventually got things unpacked, life settled down, and we made awesome friends. ( as I am typing this Grant just informed us that our "awesome friends" have stolen our dinner, BBQ and all.) We are now preparing for the next chapter in our lives and are actually a little depressed about leaving the great people we've met. Two years ago we could not wait to be done with the Utah chapter of our lives. I now feel like this will be the time and place in our lives that we always look back on and smile, carefree years, our heap of an apartment that has become home, and friend that have been our family when we didn't have family near by.