House Full of Blessings

House that we originally made an offer on 3 weeks ago - buyer walked.

We made a new offer, for $10K less than our first offer.

Waited all week to hear back from the bank.

Yesterday - found out the bank accepted our offer and our terms.

We did a happy dance. YAY!!!!!!!!

Now if you want the nitty gritty...

So let me just start off by saying that my dear husband will probably not approve of me writing this blog so soon, but I am justifying it by the fact that it's mostly our families that read our blog.  Obviously, we still have many steps to go to complete the buying of this house - the biggest hurdle being the financing. And so even though we're super excited, it's still not time to break out the sparkling cider and celebrate. Yet.

So remember the post that I wrote last week entitled "House, Car, Job"?  And you remember me telling you about a house that we had found and put an offer on, but didn't end up getting it because a few others had made an offer on it as well and someone else ended up being chosen over us?

I was so sad about that whole thing.  We looked at more houses after that happened and just weren't finding anything.  What we were finding were either super ugly, old, or just plain weird.  So we decided to just stop looking until some new foreclosures came on the market. I told Will "I hope the other buyer backs out and we can still get that house."  But as Will kept checking the MLS listing, he saw it go from available, to pending inspection, to pending. It seemed quite certain that their deal would go through.

And then last week, as you know, our Kia died.  As in totally ka-puts.  We've been a one car family now for over a week, and it's been all right. I haven't gone anywhere, but have a huge long list of things I need to do this weekend to make up for it.  Meanwhile Will has been driving our Jetta to his bus stop, and then either carpooling or busing it to work from there.

We've been looking online for a used car.  We had the discussion about whether or not we should get a nicer newer bigger family car (which would be more money), or just get a temporary dinky cheap commuter car for Will.  If we got a nicer newer car, it would use up our down-payment for a possible home (because we want to pay cash for a car).  For a moment, we considered it because the home we wanted was gone and there wasn't anything else. But we decided to still keep hope that we would be able to buy a home soon, and so we decided to either get a cheap commuter car, or something slightly nicer (and then the Jetta would become Will's car).

A few days after that, we received an email from the real estate agent on the house that we had originally wanted, saying that the buyer had walked.  We talked about it that night and put together a new offer on the home, and waited all week to hear back.  We finally got word yesterday afternoon that the bank had accepted our offer.

I know we don't have the house for sure yet, because we still need to get the financing from our bank, but if we do get the home and all goes through - it's amazing to know that Heavenly Father really is mindful of us.  Sometimes we think we know what we want, but He knows what is better for us.  If we had gotten the house 3 weeks ago, we would have paid between $10 - $15K more for it.  We also wouldn't have known that our 2nd car was going to die and needed to budget money for that as well.

Here is a photo of our hopefully future home on the left.  As you can see, it needs some love.  It is a foreclosure and we will basically be re-doing the entire thing.  We would love to do the exterior the same color/style as the home shown on the right - with pale yellow paint, black shutters, and white trim.  We also want to put a white picket fence in the yard and do it up cute.  And then the inside of course is a whole other story.

So we obviously still have a ways to go on the process, but we are really excited.  This will be our very first home!  We are trying to do a loan that includes an extension loan for fixes on the house, which makes the process more lengthy.  But hopefully all will go smoothly and we'll be able to close on the house at the earliest Oct 21st (but probably be later).

Anyway. That's the good news!