House Hunt: The final chapter (hopefully)

Isn't it funny how when we pray and God answers exactly what we prayed for, we can still hesitate and question the situation?

We looked for houses...then we stopped....then we started again....then we found one we thought could be a great possibility. I had actually been tracking this house for sometime and watched it fall tremendously in price over the past two months. It came to a stop at $189,900 a few weeks ago. Derek and I decided last week to throw out a ridiculous offer of $170,000 since it would need a lot of fixing up. There was a little last minute mis-understanding between our realtor and us and he added in that we also wanted in addition 3% of closing costs plus $1500 of fixing on the furnace and water heating. We said that was fine and we figured the whole thing was so ridiculous anyways that it didn't really matter.

We prayed about it tons and asked God to either have them accept our ridiculous offer if it was meant to be, or reject it and not even consider a reasonable counter offer if it wasn't. Most people we talked to told us to be prepared for them to reject us completely since the offer was so low. Well they countered but didn't drop the price even $1. They said they would do the closing cost and fixes but kept the price the same. We prayed about it more and sadly both felt God was telling us to walk away. I was sad but felt at peace with it. That was when I wrote my blog on Tuesday about feeling peace. I had come to terms with the fact that redoing a house wasn't apparently my next task. We decided to simply let the offer expire Monday night and take a break (yet again) from the house hunting process.

Wednesday morning my realtor called telling me that the bank had contacted him saying they had reconsidered and wanted to know if we would still be interested in the house if they accepted all our original terms and price. What!?! This house was originally put on the market in February at $279,900 and had been dropped to $189,00. It was now going to be given to us for $170,000 plus they are going to pay $5,100 in closing costs plus do $1,500 in fix ups!? So Derek and I prayed about it and feel that this is why we were supposed to walk away in the beginning so that God could bless us with this even more amazing situation. My realtor said he has never even heard of anything like this before.

Even though it looked perfect and we even prayed for this exact same situation we still took more time to pray about it before accepting it. We do feel like this is a total blessing from God but we are still staying calm and guarding our hearts about it knowing full well that the inspection will be a big deal and could reveal deal breakers since the house is older. If that happens we will trust that it is all a part of God's plan, but for now we feel very blessed to see this all coming to a fruitful end. We signed papers last night redoing our original offer (everything the same except extending the closing date one week).

It's so crazy to think here we are possibly about to buy our first home. Even more exciting is the fact that last night we also attended a couples bible study for the first time that is looking to move it's location to someone else's house. We could cram everyone in our apartment but it's awesome to think that this could be one of the first uses for a new home as well. We are excited to see what God will do and are waiting patiently. We don't need a house or to leave these apartments, but if we do we want to use the house as another way we can serve and give thanks to God.

Hopefully this is the final chapter in our house hunting subject...but we will wait and see!

"There is surely a future hope for you, and your hope will not be cut off." -Proverbs 23:18