Welcome to Homeownership, Enjoy!

For the record, I am not the guy in the pic, although I will look like him in 10 years. Recently our family bought a home in the Okemos area. Like many, we've been riding the housing market waves and finally caught a wave that landed us in a home we love. We closed in February and moved in about a week and a half ago.

No, that is not our hose above, that's too fancy.

Our dream started 5 years ago when we started dating. We both have been married previously. We got married 3 years ago and have had an amazing time growing our family together, we have two boys a ten and fourteen year old. All we've been dreaming about is having a yard and a neighborhood for the kids to play in and make new friends. I also like to stay busy and I look forward to maintaining and improving our home.

All the stars aligned and our dream became a reality. Having been a previous homeowner I understood that problems arise with owning a home. We recently had our kitchen drain snaked, that's not a big deal. Then came Friday evening and the rain that pummeled mid Michigan.

I live in a neighborhood where drain ditches curb waterflow to inground drains, through the front yard. As it turns out, having only lived in the home for a couple of days, the pipe underneath my driveway that keeps the water flowing to the drain was clogged and it quickly filled our driveway and our garage with water because of the overflow. The overflow ran into our driveway that is downhill.

At the time all of this was happening I prayed and understood that whatever was going to happen was intended to happen the way it would. Although I wasn't happy with the situation, I was calm. We discovered that our neighbors are truly amazing and brought hoses for us to run to the drain from our driveway, our driveway is a good distance from the drain. Having just moved in we had not bought hoses let alone a water pump. We never expected this to ever happen, not a blip on the radar. Thankfully my in-laws are amazing and showed up just in time with a water pump they use to drain their pool.

Had the water pump showed up five minutes later the water would have breached the interior of our home and that would've been catastrophic. I witnessed something amazing with regard to my spirituality, my neighbors, in-laws and makind. The right people came into our path at exactly the right time to help us, I think that is awesome. It doesn't happen by mistake. We also learned some valuable lessons about how the waterflows in front of our home. In the end we didn't lose much and also know that some maintenance needs to be done asap to prevent this from happening again. Life lesson!

When dreaming of owning a home, we had hoped that our neighbors would be amazing. To my neighbors, thank you for helping us in a time of need and we will be cooking out soon. To those that are entering homeownership, you will have problems that are out of your control. Call upon your village to help you. The best piece of advice I can give is be patient, don't fly off the handle. Work as a team with your wife, roommate or what have you. In the end, it will all work out. Good luck!