I'm not exactly sure where I pictured we would be when we first started this house process three months ago, but I never could have imagined it ending quite this way.
We still haven't found a house. We looked at hundreds of houses online, dozens of them in person and seriously considered three of them. For many different reasons, however, nothing felt quite right. It felt like we were the ones pushing it along, not the Lord. We looked at our calendar and felt ourselves pushing some more. C'mon, we thought, we've got three months. Three months for everything to fall into place and move ito the house of our dreams.
We wondered if we had made the right move. Was it too early to have sold our house? Should we have found a place first and then went through the process of putting our house on the market? No. We had had a peace about the timing of the process, we were acting within our real estate agent's advice and within both sets of parents' wisdom. It had been time for us to move on. We needed something with a kitchen on the first floor, more bedrooms and more living space. This family of four was simply outgrowing our two-bedroom apartment.
Despite our efforts, time kept closing in on us. My husband decided to build us a second option in case we weren't successful in finding a place in time. After some thought and prayer, he called my Great Aunt Mary and Uncle Ron, who live in my great-grandma's house just six blocks from us. They live on the second floor of a double, where the bottom apartment is vacant since my other great aunt died more than a year ago. It would need some work, but we knew it was a good back-up plan in case we needed more time to find our house. They were THRILLED about the prospect of having us rent from them, not to mention the work Andy would do to clean it up to make it more comfortable.
Fewer and fewer houses came on the market and we wondered if we would need much more time than we had anticipated. Andy called my Aunt Mary and started making plans to move in after our new buyer closes on our apartment.
Long story short? We've moving. In three weeks.
The buyer will have his final walkthrough in our apartment this Sunday and we're scheduled to close on Monday. Andy will continue working on our "transition apartment" and we'll move by August 1st. Thankfully, we had been able to stay here more than a month after closing, though we'll be turning in the keys a month early. Not only is he cleaning it up - an apartment that's quite a bit larger than our current one - but he's plastering the closets, tearing up the carpet to refurbish the old hardwood and installing a stackable washer/dryer on our floor, a dishwasher and a garbage disposal. Just to make it comfortable for me. Sigh. He loves me. And did I mention the apartment has a HUGE master bedroom? And three bedrooms? And it's on the first floor? And it has air conditioning? Yeah. I think we're going to be veeeeery comfortable.
So in the next few weeks, I am organizing cupboards, sifting through bins and making our weekly menus out of the items in my freezer and cupboards. It's not how I imagined things to work out, but it's better than I had expected. Now we'll have plenty of time to look for a house without worrying about a lease or going through the process of buying/selling until we're ready. And, we'll be staying in a house that has seen five generations of my mom's extended family, with a very grateful aunt and uncle upstairs.
God. Is. Good.
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