So it’s been a while since I’ve blogged. I was doing pretty good at keeping up on this, and then we hit a super stressful month. At the beginning of October, we started preparing a bid for a potential client. I’m not naming names, because of privacy. Anyway, we emailed the bid at the beginning of November, and then didn’t hear back for over a week. They responded that our prices were significantly higher than some other companies, and gave us the opportunity to come down. We did and after a lot of prayer, we sent it back. Anthony felt that our prices were still too high, but I felt we couldn’t afford to go any lower and still pay drivers. We didn’t hear back, and assumed they had gone with someone else, but a week later they emailed us again and asked for more details and said if we made the first cut, they’d want to tour our facility. Anthony emailed back and answered their questions, and told them that we work from home and offered to just go in to their offices and answer any questions they might have. That was the week before Thanksgiving, and we didn’t hear back for about a week and a half. Then they emailed us again last week and said they wanted to tour our facility. Anthony was really worried about that. He was worried they would come in and see a house, not a business. That they’d make judgements about our capabilities based off the appearance of our home. It’s hard to come across as a professional when you have gaming systems, and toys in the yard, and pictures of a butt on your mantle. After a lot more prayer, we decided that Heavenly Father helped us get this far, and He wasn’t going to abandon us at the last minute. Anthony emailed back and said that would be fine, but reminded them that this is a home-based business. They said they’d still like to come tour.
The appointment is today, and we’ve spent the last week getting ready. We did a few repairs, painted the hall, and put up curtains in the kitchen and dining room. (The dining room used to have ugly, broken vertical blinds.) It’s amazing how different the house looks with minimal effort and investment. We rearranged the office and Anthony’s mom and grandma gave us some equipment that we were going to buy, like a filing cabinet and a fax machine. Julie also helped us with the office arrangement. She used to have a courier company, so she had some really valuable information for us. We talked a lot about hypothetical situations, what our strengths are, how to draw attention to our good qualities, etc. I feel really prepared, but last night I only slept for 3 hours because I was too anxious. Plus, Anthony kept putting his hand under my butt while he was asleep.
Please pray for us that this will go well. We really need this so we can pay bills. This isn’t just extra money we’re hoping to snag, we NEED it. If we don’t get this client, then I will have to go get a job outside the home, and I really don’t want to pay for daycare while Anthony’s in school.
I would also like to give special thanks to Mary for loaning us a Scentsy warmer so our house will smell nice for this appointment. I have been anti-Scentsy for a long time, because I like my house to smell like a house., so I don’t use candles or air fresheners. If something gets stinky, I open a window and air out the house. Well, I put the warmer on my mantle with a couple cubes of Sunkissed Citrus. After a day, I’ve already started hinting to Anthony that this might make a good Christmas present. If any of you are interested in trying it out, here is my sister’s website: https://marynelson.scentsy.us/Home
In other news, our house is looking AWESOME. I figured out a way to keep the kitchen cupboards organized that works for me. The solution is baskets. I went to Dollar Tree a couple months ago and bought a bunch of rectangular baskets. I put 2 per shelf, and there’s a little extra room for tall things that don’t belong in the basket categories, like oatmeal. My categories are: pasta, desserts (jell-o, cake mix), spices, boxed soups, envelopes (gravy mixes, koolaid, etc.), and baking things (chocolate chips, baking soda/powder, a small bottle of canola oil, etc.). My cupboards have stayed neat and organized for over a month now. It’s so great to just pull out a basket and grab the thing I need instead of climbing on a chair and shuffling through all the tiny things for a bottle of pumpkin spice. I also cleared out our shelving unit with our canned food. I took out everything we weren’t eating and donated it to our ward food drive. We went from 3 shelves overflowing with cans, to 1 1/3 shelves. There was so much stuff I didn’t even realize we had, like 18 cans of peaches, and 7 cans of pears. We would TOTALLY eat those, if I knew about them. Then I took all the cans from the kitchen cupboards, and moved them to the shelves. Then I organized it all by type. It’s so pretty! I also rearranged the appliances on my counter top and it more than doubled my work space. I LOVE IT! I hung canvas curtains in the kitchen window, and straw-colored floor-length curtains in the dining room.
The office has been flipped a little. It now looks like this:
Desk A has the Printer and laptop. On the wall above it is a big message board.
Desk B has the monitor for the desk top and some file folder holders. The tower is in the corner between the 2 desks. Abouve the desk and tower are some maps.
Bookcases A&B are tall. Bookcase C is short.
The filing cabinet is painted black, and has the fax machine on top of it. Above the filing cabinet and Bookcase C, we have a large white board, and a dry erase “Planning Space.”
We painted the hall with some of Julie’s leftover paint. It’s now the same brown as our living room, and the trim is a very light yellow. I painted the cupboard doors at the end of the hall the same yellow, and the trim around them brown. I took off the handles on the doors and spray painted them black. It looks so pretty in our hall now. I also painted the wood medicine cabinet black in our hall bathroom.
Andrea is so darn cute. She walks while holding our hands. Sarah always wants to help her walk around. They are getting to be best friends. I think she can say Hi and Dad, but it’s still hard to tell if shes saying words or just making noises that happen to fit the situation. She’ll see Anthony and get really excited and say, “Da! Da!” but she also says that when she’s crawling down the hall. And when we walk into a room, sometimes she lifts up her hand and says, “Eye!” She pretends to read. She’ll turn the pages of a book and jabber to herself.
Sarah is also super cute, but not getting enough sleep. And that makes her cranky. The problem is she can’t go to sleep til 9 or later, but then Andrea always wakes up at 8 and that wakes up Sarah. Sarah has always been a 13 hour kind of girl, and I definitely notice a difference when she only gets 11. She got pink eye last week. The sickness combined with the lack of sleep has made her a little hard to handle.
Well, I need to get back to preparing for this appointment, but I will blog more later today. Probably.
