Thursday, September 18, 2008

Is the House Hunt Finally Over???

Here's the latest.

I guess you sort of already know about the house. It's a 5 bedroom, 3.5 bathroom, 2 master, 3442 square foot house that is fully foreclosed. We'll be purchasing it for $68 a square foot; the single best deal we've come across yet. All other houses we've seen with this exact floor plan are selling for $100,000 more than the bank is selling this house to us for or more.. It is not in a CDD community, the neighborhood has one street and is gated. There are 37 houses in the neighborhood and it backs up to a large lake.

We had the inspections done on it on Saturday. They didn't uncover anything crazy, except there are termites in the front yard. They haven't made it to the house yet. It'll cost nearly $1000 rid the yard/house of termites or the threat of termites and fire ants and any other sort of 6- or 8- or 100-legged creature that may want to reside on the property.

Being foreclosed, the house needs work. We'll have to replace all the appliances in the kitchen and the faucet and maybe even the cabinet under the kitchen sink. It needs a very good cleaning (can you say "Merry Maids"). The upstairs has bamboo flooring (lovely) and the downstairs has tile (yuck).

All in all, I'm very happy about this. Although I wanted to just abandon this wretched state and all its taxes and CDDs and run away to Texas, I feel that this is where God wants us. We've tried to buy four houses this year and this is the only one that has gone this smoothly. We've asked God to bar the way if the current house we were trying to buy wasn't the one and he ALWAYS has. This house has been smooth sailing. We put in the offer Monday, they accepted Tuesday, We signed more paperwork Wednesday, they returned the signed paperwork/contract Thursday and had the house inspected Saturday. We've got insurance and a guaranteed 6% interest loan. All the things we said were a requirement have been met and I just have to believe that God wants us here for now.

I wonder what it is that I am supposed to be learning here. There is a never ending stream of "things you don't know about God but you should know." The waiting and the timing and the trusting...it's all very difficult for my frail excuse of faith. I very often found myself yelling at God because I lost my trust that he knew what he was doing. It's at times like this that I feel really stupid and sheepish and repentant that I ever lost faith at all and humbled that HE always knows what the plan is and whatever it is, it is good, even if it doesn't seem like it at the time. I need to learn to view my circumstances through his eyes instead of through my own flawed human eyes.

Haven't I had this conversation with myself before on many occasions? Why can't I learn?

Here's the front of the house. The house next door is for sale and there's one other house for sale in the neighborhood. It need a lot of yard work, to say the least. It's not the most attractive house I've ever seen, but it'll do.

There's the stairs up and the room that Del is coming out of is the bonus room. That there will be where we accomplish all sorts of school and fun stuff like that. There's a wet bar in there that I didn't like at first but then Del mentioned that it's got a working sink!!! What school couldn't use a sink for things like cleaning up after art class and such. Great idea. It has room for a small fridge, too. Don't know if we'll actually put a fridge there or build shelves in that area. We think the former owners played a lot of pool in that room.

Here's part of the kitchen and the breakfast nook. The pantry is nice and big. It's not the biggest kitchen we've seen in our house search, but it's about 3 times as big as the current one I've been working in for 2.5 years and the biggest one I've ever been able to use on a daily basis so I'm happy. My dream would be to have a gas cook top and double ovens in there. How does a large family survive without double ovens?There is the bedroom the girls will stay in. Look, it's already purple! And check out the bamboo floors! I think it's so cool because it's big enough to fit all five of the girls in there, and their dressers and all their toys. It's as big as both the secondary rooms put together in our current apartment. That leaves enough rooms for a sewing room for me. THANK YOU JESUS!!!

3 comments:

Johanna said...

You just aren't going to know what to do with all that space after so much time in an apartment and sharing your parent's house when Del was in Korea! I am really happy for you that things are working out well on this.

I want to know though, what kind of magic trick did you use to get blogger to time stamp this as Thursday morning, yet here it is, clearly published on Wednesday evening??? :)

Joanna said...

Yeah, I'm trying to figure out how to get it to post on a certain day and the method I used didn't really work out; it just changed the date it said it posted and still posted it yesterday.

I think it's funny that when I think about all the space I can see us using all of it and I can't figure out how we're all living here in this little apartment. But somehow we manage. The thing I'm looking forward to the most is having a sewing room and a room for school. I can't wait to be able to close the door on whatever project I'm currently working on and not worry about who's going to get into it next. And I can't wait to be able to go downstairs and leave school behind. I think there will be less distractions upstairs like no TV or stereo and things like that.

Anonymous said...

Hey, that is AWESOME! It looks lovely! I have to agree on the Bamboo and tile, lovely and yuck ;)
hehe I bet you will be happy to get out of an apartment and into a house :)

If you want to schedule a post on blogger go here:

http://draft.blogger.com/home

And then change the post date like you did. Instead of just marking it with that date and posting it immediately, it will post it on the scheduled date instead. :)