Big Birtha: What's in a Name and How We Found Home

Me, Clayton and Big Birtha on closing day, aka, demo day!

Birtha. Big Birtha. She is ours, and she is glorious. She is tall, sturdy and a blue-y gray. And she found so many ways to tell us she is where we were meant to call home. 

Birtha is spelled like "birth" in "birthday," which is intentional. We found out our offer was accepted on my fiance Clayton's birthday. Nine days later - on my birthday - we found out the seller had accepted our repairs. We closed on my grammy Erney and uncle Rick's birthday. Closing day also happened to be exactly five years to the day of when Clayton and I met. 

While demoing the wall that separated the dining room and kitchen (we are renovating Birtha ourselves!), we found a part of a newspaper from 1952 wrapped around a metal pipe. The newspaper had Truman and Eisenhower on it, and on the other side it had an advertisement for a Levy's store. Levy - a shortening of my name, Levity. 

While removing a very large DIY wooden bookshelf upstairs, we found a playing card with the words "Clay to Win" on it. Clay - a shortening of Clayton's name.

While demoing the kitchen cabinets, we found a package of unused 100 shiny brass grommets with a brand name of "Pit Bull." Rinlee and Lula are our two pit mixes. 

A few weeks later, while I was removing the baseboard in our master bedroom, I found two very small pieces of newspaper. Despite being around 1/16th the size of a normal sheet of newspaper, both pieces had the date on them - March 28, 1996. March 28th is my mom and gramma's birthday. 

While demoing the fireplace (there were two fireplaces on top of the original one, and our poor chimney was being pulled away from the house from all of that unnecessary weight!), we found a small red plane, one of its wings melted. Yeah, that's what I thought, too, but I'm going to be positive with this one and say it's because I work in the Aviation and Aerospace industry. 

Birtha was built in 1928, the same year that my gramma was born.

Margaret was the name of the woman who owned this house prior, also the name of my grammy Erney. 

There have been other things along the way, too - one very cool and completely unexpected one which I'll post at a later time - but with all of those coincidences, signs, whatever you want to call them, we feel like this home was meant for us. There have been days when I can be doing something as simple as walking back inside with the dogs and all of a sudden, I feel this overwhelming sense of happiness that this is our home. 

We're so excited to share Birtha with you. We hope you love her just as much as we do.