We shall not be homeless!

Ok, so major test from God this week on faith and trust and you know what? I kind of failed in that department and let panic take over just a little bit too much.  I have already received some "I told you so" remarks and felt guilty for not trusting that God would provide, so I don't need to hear anymore.

So in the saga of the house hunt, I last posted about our first day of searching and the panic that set in when I realized that only two out of the second day's 11 were still available (the other nince were under contract, short sales, or bank owned foreclosures that will not accept contingency offers). Out of the set of six that I emailed to Nita on Sunday morning at 6:00 am when I could not sleep because of anxiety, only two of those were available still. People, it was getting serious. I mean, if out of seven homes the day before we were only happy with two of them, how good could our odds actually be with only four more to see?? Oh doubting Thomas.

Here we were, day two of searching for a home for our family, and we pretty much needed to find our home in four choices. Because of our time deadline, if we didn't get an offer going on Sunday to give a seller time to consider and counter we were probably looking at temporary housing in between just because of the time it takes to execute a loan.

Would you believe that out of four houses, we had an absolute favorite, two that were the identical house but one needed way more work than the other in terms of painting and flooring, and one that was a big fat no way?? Three out of four!

Sunday evening we came up with an offer on our top two favorites, the first one being a 2039 square foot one story that was fully updated and priced well below our top budget, and the second a 2096 square foot two story that was a great house but needed to be completely painted among other cosmetic fixes and was priced at the top of our budget at $10k more than house #1. So as to not put all of our eggs in one basket, we came up with an offer on both and then if both were accepted we could go from there, although we both knew that the one story was the house we wanted.

Nita submitted both offers Monday morning. We began the wait. Within an hour we heard back from the two story house. They had countered our offer with an acceptable to us offer but we both knew this wasn't our house unless the other one just was a big "no". So we waited some more. And more. I checked my email. I checked my phone. I waited. All.day.long. I convinced myself that my email must be broken. I moped around the house. I decided it must be bad news because we hadn't heard. I tried to imagine our stuff in the two story and couldn't do it. I tried to be positive. Kate and I played while I tried not to think about it. It was torture! Finally a little after 8 pm Nita called. I nearly jumped out of my skin trying to answer it.

They accepted our offer, as is! We had decided to offer list price on the house because it was well worth it with all the updates, but we asked for $3000 in closing costs. Even if they had came back with list and no closing, we would have taken it. But why not ask, right? It worked!