The house hunt

Part of the reason I have been so bad about posting lately is that we have been house hunting. I posted awhile ago and mentioned that we had redone our entire budget and the main reason for that was to look into buying a house, but also because we're planning a trip to South Africa at Christmas and Rob is hoping to start back to school. Anyways, all that to say that we have been amazed at how much money we were wasting before. We have stopped eating fast food almost entirely and never do Starbucks anymore. We just make it at home. We do our main grocery shop every 2 weeks and just pick up milk, bread, fruit, etc. on the other weeks as we run out. Those simple changes have cut our grocery bill in half.

Anyways, we looked for several weeks at several homes. Those of you who have done this before know what it's like. The more we looked the more we learned about ourselves and what was really important to us in a home and what we could live with. We started out thinking we wanted homes in a certain area, but all the homes in that area in our price range were in need of so much work. We debated on getting a super fixer upper and I just really hesitated on the whole thing, mainly because of Jake. I felt like if it was just me and Rob camping out in one room and working on the house little by little it would be one thing, but Jake is about ready to crawl and soon he'll be learning to walk and I just didn't want to move into a home that needed so much work done when I would need to have a safe place and my attention on my son. Rob agreed with me so we started looking in other areas.

At the beginning of our search we had wanted a big yard. (We want to plant a garden.) Then as we looked we decided that that wasn't something that needed to determine whether it was the home we made an offer on or not. (We don't even have any yard equipment yet and the bigger the yard and more work it requires, the more money we'll be spending there.) There were several other things we realized as we went along.

Then we went and looked at this foreclosure home about 1 mile from Furman. It looked like somone had only lived in it for like 2 weeks. It was only a year and a half old and the only obvious signs of people having lived there was dents in the carpet where furniture had been, one black mark on one wall, and hooks where picture and curtain rods had hung. But, Rob felt like it was too far out from where we live now. So we didn't think a thing of it again. We looked at 5 or 6 more homes and we just weren't hitting our treasure chest, if you know what I mean.

Then, one Saturday I asked if we could go look at that foreclosure again. I asked our agent to find out everything he could about it. He hadn't really looked into it before because we didn't act interested. He e-mailed us Friday night and told us it was a really good price compared to the homes in the neighborhood. We went and looked at it again as critically as we could. And, we decided to make an offer. Our offer was significantly lower than the price the bank was asking and we also asked them to pay closing costs and to install a stove (since there wasn't one in the house.) Our hopes were that they would accept the offer and ask us to pay their listed price. They did.

We had a home inspection done yesterday and all the recommendations by the inspector are minor details (things like cleaning out the dryer vent and fixing the hinge on the screen door.) We are amazed at how God has directed and provided. If all goes well, we will close, Lord willing, on March 27.

We are excited to move closer to our church and to be in a neighborhood safe for me to go running and walking with Jake in. We are also thrilled to have a home with three bedrooms and hope we can host people there from time to time. We praise God for his provision for us in this way as we seek to be good stewards of what He has given us and to make wise investments.

Here is a picture of the home we will Lord willing be moving to at the end of the month. :)