The Marvelous Story of Our New Home - Part One

Late last Spring I was praying about our housing and financial situation. At that point we had been renting the home we currently live in for about two and a half years. Things were very tight financially and we felt we needed to buy a house. We had gone back and forth several times about buying this house (the one we’re living in), but we really weren’t sure if that was the right thing to do. When I was praying last Spring, God told me He was going to do something “amazing and unexpected” with our housing and finances. As time progressed, it became more and more clear that we were not supposed to buy the house we are renting. Part of that is because of Todd’s services for his speech therapy. We need to be in a different school district so that if he needs to go to a special needs preschool when he turns three-years-old in April, he can go to a school that has a good program.

We decided it would be best to wait until after all the craziness of the holidays before we tried to start house hunting. I was really dreading house hunting, but then after Christmas we started looking online at some houses and found some things we really liked. Then I started getting excited about it. We emailed our friend who is a real estate agent and told her that we wanted to start house hunting in mid-January. Well, around a week later we get an email from our landlord stating that she needed to move back into this house. We are on a month-to-month lease right now, but she was gracious enough to give us 60 days to move out, and said she would give us more time if we needed it. Well, there’s nothing like a deadline to put some fire under you to get you motivated to get something done. And, just in case we had any doubts left about whether or not we were supposed to buy this house that we’re renting, God removed ALL doubt, speaking through the voice of our landlord.

We received the notice from our landlord on January 5th, a Monday. That day we called our friend who is a mortgage broker to get financing, and we started looking in earnest for our new house online. As for the financing, we got a much better deal than we expected, thanks to the raise that Shawn got last fall, and the cost of living adjustment he got last month. God also provided for the down payment, and because it had been more than three years since we had owned our home in Virginia Beach, we qualify for the first-time homebuyers tax credit! The day we got the notice from our landlord, we also contacted our friend, the real estate agent, and made an appointment to look at homes that coming weekend. There was one house on our list that we weren’t able to see that weekend. There had been tenants in it, and the homeowner wanted to make a few repairs before the house was shown. Shawn wasn’t really excited about that house either, because it only has a one-car garage.

So we looked at houses on January 9th & 10th. We found three that we really liked and considered putting an offer on. We did put an offer in on one of those three houses. The crazy thing was that house had been on the market for several months, and there had been no offers as far as I know. Right after we put our offer in, someone else also put a bid on the house. We had the opportunity to change our bid, but Shawn and I both felt that we should keep it as it was and see what happened. We knew that if our bid wasn’t accepted that just meant that God had something better for us. Well, our bid was not the one accepted. So we went house hunting again that Friday.

(To be continued until tomorrow…)