Woman Loses House, Job, Dog; Retains Painting Freedoms

Optimism is a wonderful thing -- when it's all you've got left.

For over a decade, Nancy Godfrey has been building her dream home from the flower-filled ground up.

"It represented my granddaughter's inheritance," Godfrey said. "All my pets are buried on that ground."

Now Nancy has to sift through every inch of that home after life threw her a few curve balls.

[...]

Nancy says her husband went on disability and then in April she lost her steady job doing construction estimates.

"This was supposed to be the family home where this would always be here," Nancy shared with tears in her eyes as she looked around the living room.

[...]

"He's a big dog," she stated thinking of her four legged companion."He goes through a 14 dollar bag of dog food a week. You've got to figure that's 60 dollars of dog food a month, that's a tank of gas so you have to decide," she said, pausing with the realization of the decision she had been faced with, "It's so hard to decide something like that."

[...]

"The thoughts did go through my head," she acknowledged. "If I was to just knock myself off Wayne could pay off the mortgage and everything would be fine," but Nancy quickly realized everything would not be fine. Looking around she knew life was worth so much more than money.

So now she is working to take the lemons that have landed in her lap and she is literally painting her new home, or at least the walls, into a shade of lemonade.

"I'm still a free person and this is still America," Nancy said emphatically. "I can still have nine colors of paint in my house if I want to; even if my house is a third of the size that it was it's still my home."

[WMBF]