The Story of Our House

I want to tell the story of our house.  It’s a story of God’s faithfulness.  It’s a story of many answers to prayer.  It’s a story of us learning to praise God during good times and hard ones.

I suppose the story begins in 2007 when we were renting an apartment in Cotati, CA, and we wanted to move.  Rent was expensive, and we wanted to lower our living expenses by buying a house.  We had no yard and we wanted a place where our kids had a lot of room to run.  We wanted a place where we could garden and maybe even have a few animals.  So when we found this place and realized that we could buy it without going into debt, we were pretty interested.  Sure the house was small and in desperate need of cosmetic improvement, but we could make it work.

We tried to be as prudent as we knew how.  We repeatedly asked the owner if everything was built with a permit – he said it was all built with a permit before he bought it 20 years ago.  Our real estate agent said so, too.  Well, except for the roof of the main house, which he said was installed without a permit.  So we refused to buy until that was permitted.  It was.  Then we were told everything else was fine.  We even asked the city if there were any other problems, and we were told that no there weren’t.  So, using all our savings, we bought it in January of 2008. 

So with a lot of help we got started fixing up the house to make it livable.  While living in a borrowed RV, we pulled out the old carpets full of cat pee.  We took out the popcorn ceiling filled with cigarette smoke.  We washed and painted the walls.  We painted the floor.  Then it was time to remodel the mold-infested bathroom.  So I went to get a plumbing permit.  The city said that they had begun the process of forcing the previous owners to legalize the granny unit just months before we bought.  We’d probably have to tear it down.

But we thought, surely we won’t have to tear it down.  Surely the government isn’t that heartless and unjust.  Surely there’s a way to legalize it.  So after we researched it extensively, it was apparent that there were three steps to go through to legalize the granny unit.  Step one – get a use permit to “build” a granny.  Step two – build a new septic system.  Step three – get a building permit and bring it up to current codes.  It was unlikely that we could get past steps one and three.  It was literally impossible for us to get past step two.  So we went back to the city and asked for mercy.  Instead, the person speaking to us literally screamed in our faces, “Tear it down!!”

It was during this time that we were leading worship at Petaluma Community Church.  It was during this time that the worship song “Blessed be Your Name” was especially dear to us.  It’s a song about praising God no matter the circumstances; in good times, praise the Lord.  In hard times, praise the Lord.  It even includes a line taken from Job 1:21.  The Lord gives and the Lord takes away.  Blessed by the name of the Lord.  By God’s grace, we were able to praise Him for His goodness in Christ, even while our house was being taken from us through no fault of our own.

So in Christ we found the strength to go on.  We appealed the ruling, and so the city couldn’t take action against us until they heard our appeal in several months.  However, amazingly that appeal board couldn’t meet for nearly a year and a half later!  That was God’s mercy, and without that delay, we would have had to tear it down.

We tried to hire several different people whose job it is to work with the city to fix problems like the one we were in.  But no one would help us.  They concluded that it was indeed impossible to fix this mess.  But amazingly, we were able to get a use permit to build a granny unit in our zoning.  One of our neighbors even came to that hearing to support us!

But this next step of building a new septic system was literally impossible.  You see, we found out that this area is what’s called a “waiver prohibition area” where the county, who oversees all septic systems even in city limits, isn’t allowed to grant waivers to build septic systems in less than ideal conditions.  However, we couldn’t meet those conditions for depth to groundwater in the winter.  But amazingly we were able to talk to one of Ephran Carillo’s assistants and she somehow was able to talk to the PRMD and get a waiver!  I actually had a non-Christian septic system designer say to me “this is a miracle.”  Even he used the word “miracle.”  It was obvious that God answered our prayers!

The third and final step was also hard – getting a building permit.  We weren’t sure we could even bring our house up to code.  Yet I drew up some plans on graph paper and submitted them, like the city asked me to.  But my first set of plans came back with hundreds of plan check comments.  After spending hours studying the building code, I drew up another set of plans, and this time a friend of a friend helped put them into CAD drawings for me.  This time the city approved them!  Now all we had to do was the actual construction – lots of construction!  So right at the end of 2010 we moved out of the granny unit that had been our home for 3 years into Jim and Kathi’s house so that we could FINALLY do the remodel work we had been wanting to do 3 years ago! 

So the good news was that since I am in seminary, I have summers off and a month of in December.  The bad news is that since I’m in seminary, I had absolutely no time to work on the house during the school year.  So I hired out the hardest stuff for me; the plumbing, electrical, and HVAC installation.  The rest I figured we could do.  Last summer we had a lot of help from our church friends – with things like painting, digging, drywalling, nailing, and more.  Also, I want to mention my brother in Christ, Steve Fink.  He worked with me just about every day for a month over the summer.  And he knows a lot about construction.  Together we were able to replace all the windows and the door, replace some of the exterior siding, and hang all the drywall that needed to be hung.  He also got me started on drywall finishing.  It was a joy to work with him.

Last Christmas break, we made some more progress, and my father-in-law Jim was been a big help with some of the finishes like the cabinets and flooring.  But we didn’t quite finish.  Then over spring break we inched even closer to the goal, but still hadn’t installed the countertops or backsplash.  Finally just a few weeks ago it was completed.  And a couple of inspections later, and we were legal!

Through it all God has been faithful and He has answered our many prayers.  I’m not saying that God always gives you what you want or keeps you from experiencing hardship.  But I am saying that He is faithful to walk with you through it, to sustain you, to teach you, and to love you.  So I want to encourage any of you who might be going through hard things; God will sustain you and He has a plan for it.

"The Lord gives and the Lord takes away - Blessed be the name of the Lord!" Job 1:21