Making Dreams Come True

For a while now Steven and I have been thinking of moving. Our three bedroom condo has served us well for the last five years, but it is starting to feel a bit tight, and every night that we lay awake listening to our neighbor bang around in his kitchen on the other side of the wall from our bedroom we dream of having a home where we own all four walls. It was one of those things we thought about, but didn't do much to promote. A few weeks ago (Tuesday, April 22, 2008) I was looking around online and did a search to find out how many four bedroom, three bedroom homes were for sale within our ward boundaries and in a price range of less than $250k. I found four, although at least three of those were split level, and Steven and I don't like the idea of opening the front door to stairs.

I mentioned my search to Steven coming home from church the next Sunday, and the following week he did his own search and on Thursday, May 1st he was looking online and came across a house that captured his attention. It is in a nice neighborhood, close to open space and walking trails. I don't know what the first thing to catch his attention was, but it does has a nice front porch, and the trim on the exterior is blue. That night after scouts he went to look at the house in person and when he got home he told me about it. The next day I drove past the house after volleyball, and although I noticed the garage door seemed to sag a bit and there were stickers plastering one of the upstairs windows, I liked what I saw. Steven emailed me links to pictures of the house and we decided to try to contact a real estate agent so we could look inside.

On Saturday we still hadn't been able to contact an agent to show us the interior, but we drove the family to the house and we peered in the windows and we still liked what we saw. On Monday we were finally able to look at the inside. The house is nice. It has four bedrooms upstairs as well as a loft area. All the bedrooms have ceiling fans. The washer and dryer hookups are also upstairs. Downstairs there is a large eat-in kitchen with hard wood floors, a livingroom, dining room and family room. The backyard is good sized, with plenty of space for a garden, and for the kids to run around. We really like this house. If we could move there, we would stay there for years and years. It is bankowned though, the result of a foreclosure. The problem with that is that while it puts the price low enough that we can afford it, it could also take a long time to hear from the bank after we make an offer.

The agent told us that we would have a better chance of our offer being accepted if we already had a contract on our condo, so since then Steven and I have sprung into action. Steven contacted a mortgage broker and the wheels are in motion to get pre-approved for a loan. I painted the kitchen cabinets. (We never cared much for the dark brown cupboards; now they are a creamy yellow that definitely brightens the room.) We've cleaned and packed away a bunch of stuff that we figure we won't need for the next few months. We've rented a storage space to keep stuff until we are ready to move, hoping to make our condo look more spacious to prospective buyers. We hope to put our house on the market in the next week or two. It is amazing what motivation finding the perfect house has been. I just hope that we can get a contract on our condo, make a bid on the house, have our bid accepted and be able to move into the house before the contract is due on our condo so we don't end up homeless. We are praying hard for everything to work out, trusting that the Lord knows what is best for us and will make all things work together for good.