“Imbalance, when embraced, can lead to growth and new possibilities.”
Today I would like to take you back to when we built our house.
Talk about a time of imbalance.
Jenna always knew that we wanted to build a house. And we also knew that we wanted to build it ourselves.
We had 2 stipulations that we both agreed on before we started building our home.
- We would not be pregnant while we built.
Jenna wanted to be involved in the building and I knew that I needed her help.
I love my queen, but when she was pregnant she was miserable. Sick all the time. Extremely irritable. Short tempered. Not understanding at all. Nothing was ever good enough.
- Our kid’s rooms would be 100% the same size so that none of them could complain about the other having a bigger room.
Both were great things to agree on.
The thing is that we didn’t bring God into these decisions. We made them and that was that.
I’m pretty sure that he heard us talking, looked at us, smiled, and said, “Watch this! I’m going to give you what you NEED not what you want!!!”
We started building our house in February of 2011. Brianna Lynn Greer Was born in March of 2012.
It took us 14 months to build our home.
You do the math!
Jenna got pregnant just a few months after we started building. Lol
We designed our house for 2 kids.
Now we have 4……….
None of our kids have the same size rooms.
Anyways.
Back to the point of this story.
During the 14 months, it took us to build our home we were extremely imbalanced.
You should know that Jenna and I built this house with our own 2 hands.
There were only 2 things that we hired out. The first was the tape and texture of our drywall. I had a grandpa that wanted to help us, so he hired some of his buddies to tape and texture our drywall.
The second thing we hired out was the stucco.
We had a group of people come by and ask if they could stucco our house. They gave me the estimate, and it was so reasonable that I couldn’t do it for that price. So we hired them to do that.
When I say that we built a house I don’t mean that hired someone to build our home. I mean that we built it from the ground up.
I dug the foundation, set the footers, ordered, poured, and trowled the concrete.
Framed the walls, plumbed the house, wired it for electricity, and installed the in-floor heating.
We were doing things that were so far ahead of our time when the inspectors came out to do one of the inspections. He said, “If you didn’t have all this work done I would make you tear it all out and start from scratch.
Then later on he came back and said, what you did 12 months ago is just now starting to become popular. I’m glad I didn’t make you tear it out. They are saying what you did is the best possible way to do it.
When I say we built our home I MEAN WE BUILT OUR HOUSE!
I would get up go to work, come home and go to work on the house. Then about 10 or 11 pm I would go to bed. Then get up the next day and do it all over again.
On weekends I was up before the sun came up and worked well into the night by lights.
Talk about a time of imbalance.
But here is the thing.
After that short 14 months of doing NOTHING except building our house. We are still enjoying our home to this day. 12 years and counting!
Originally we built our home on our own because my dad built his, and my grandparents built theirs.
Not to mention it was going to save us a TON of $$$$.
In the end, I know that god had us build this amazing home because he needed me to know that I can do anything that I put my mind to.
He needed to know that if the world laughs at you, it shouldn’t detour you. Instead, it should be the fuel that makes your passion EXPLODE!
He needed me to go through that process so that was we boot-strap a multi-million $$ business I would know that times of imbalance are needed for ultimately achieving EXTREME goals.
