We're finally moved into our new house!  I've been wanting to write out the story of how God provided this house for us, and it's time.  (Actually, I had most of this typed out and tried to save it here as a draft, and the next time I came back, it had totally disappeared.  Oh well.)  Anyway, here's our story:

Back in July 2006, we went to a few open houses, and saw a house that we really liked.  It was a town over from the one where we'd been living, but it was less than a year old, larger than the one we were in, and was on an acre of land.  It didn't have any landscaping or anything done to it; even the grass was scraggly.  But, we figured that if we could get the price down, we'd be able to do some nice landscaping, have a pool and a deck put in, etc.  We put in a bid, and after a few bid/counter-bids, they accepted our offer, contingent on us selling our house (which wasn't even on the market yet.)  According to the contract, they could not consider an offer from anyone else unless that offer didn't have a contingency. 

During August, we worked hard to get our house ready to sell...we packed our schoolroom (except for books we'd need to start the year), painted almost all of the rooms, replaced our garage doors, DH re-caulked and painted all of the windows...we had "realtor drills" so that the kids would know what to do and what the house should look like when a realtor came to show the house.

Here's what it looked like when we were done:

  

We put the house on the market on September 1st.  Over the next three months, we had over 20 couples come to look at it.  Just about everyone had something positive to say about it; a few were disappointed that we'd never upgraded the kitchen (why?...never felt the need to...) or replaced the roof (it wasn't leaking, and the shingles weren't curling...), but we didn't get any offers. 

Throughout that whole time, we had complete peace about everything.  Yes, I got antsy about not having all the school materials that I wanted readily available, but I knew that God had something planned for us.

In early December, DH started having second thoughts about moving to the house we had a contract on.  It would add 10 minutes to his commute, making it 45 minutes each way; it was farther away from his family, church, and pretty much everywhere we go on a regular basis.  He said he'd be willing to pay more to stay closer to where we were.  I told him that it was up to him...he's the one that would be affected by the location on a daily basis.  We had started talking about possible ways to get out of the contract when our real estate agent called and said that he'd heard from the seller's agent that they were getting an offer without a contingency and did we want to lift our contingency or cancel the contract?  We were very happy at this point to tell them that they were free to accept the other offer.  So, we were out of that contract, and we started looking around our area. 

We didn't see anything that we really liked until we stopped in at a builder's trailer to check out their floor plans for a new development that they were getting ready to build.  We liked the floor plan for one of their models, and put down a (refundable) deposit to hold one of the lots.   When we sat down to talk to them about the different options, the price was creeping up...and up...and up...  plus we knew that we'd have to do the landscaping, pool, etc.  We were still okay with it, but of course, we figured our purchase would still be contingent on us selling our house.  However, from the builder, we found out that banks had "creative financing" methods that would allow us to get a mortgage on a new house before selling the one we were in, or something like that.  Interesting.

Then DH did something that completely surprised me...He bumped the price range up on his realtor.com  search!  He figured he'd look around to see how much more it would cost to get a house with all the "extras" already done, and sent me a link to a house that he found.  It was only 2 miles away from our house, closer to church and his family.  We called our agent and went to see it on a Saturday.  The house was gorgeous, and had everything we'd ever wanted.  We thought about putting in a bid for $15,000 less than their asking price...until our agent called us on Monday and said that two other couples had looked at it on Sunday and had put in offers, one of which was full price with a home sale contingency, the other of which was less than full price, but without a contingency.  I called the bank, and the loan officer I spoke with said that they'd be willing to give us basically two mortgages on the new home, one of which we'd pay off when we sold our current house.  So, we put in an offer slightly above asking price without a home sale contingency.  They accepted our offer!

But wait, it gets better!  When our agent introduced himself to the owner of the house, she asked him if he was the one listing a house in a certain development, and if so, was that our house?  Yes, he was, and yes, it was.  She had just asked her agent to show her that house.  She came that week and looked at our house.  At first she thought that it was more house than she wanted, but a week later she came back to look at it again...We told our agent to tell hers what our bottom price was; he passed that information on, and she offered that much for our house.  We accepted her offer, and we had a house swap deal!  And, we didn't have to end up taking out two mortgages after all.

The owner of our new house wanted a quick closing, and since we were swapping houses, we were able to work out the closing and moving date and all those details.  We exchanged phone numbers so that we wouldn't have to go through our agents for everything.  She cleared out a bay of her garage and gave us the garage door opener so that we could start moving boxes in.  When we had half of our garage moved into hers, we gave her our garage door opener and she moved some of her stuff into our house.  By the time moving day came, we probably had half of our house in her garage!  (We didn't tell our lawyers until the closing!)  We've sort of kept in touch...the Post Office hasn't always forwarded the mail, so we probably see one another about once a week to exchange mail, etc.

What amazes us is how God had everything worked out  throughout the whole process, and how he led us step by step.  If someone had put in an offer on our house during the first 3 1/2 months that it was on the market, we'd have been "stuck" in the first house, farther away from everything.  We didn't find out about the possibility of buying a house before ours sold until we looked at new construction.  If we hadn't looked at the new construction, we wouldn't have bumped our price range up to find this house.  Swapping houses made lots of the little details work out perfectly...for example, I wanted to bring my kitchen range with me; our lawyer had told us that we'd have to replace it, and recommended that we do that before we put the house on the market.  We didn't, since I wanted to continue to cook on it, and the way it worked out we were able to just swap ranges.  The real estate agents and the lawyers both commented that they'd never done a real estate closing like ours where the parties were purchasing each other's houses.

Our new home has everything we ever had on our wish list (except for a garbage disposal, which we'll probably have put in soon), and then some.  We have a room off to the side that I use as a school room.  I love it because I can close the doors at the end of the day and we don't have to look at our school stuff all the time.  It has a Trex deck, a pool, a concrete patio, a full basement with two staircases (important to us...since the kids will be playing down there, we wanted two ways out); there's a balcony off the master bedroom, I have a little "office" between the kitchen and dining room...the list goes on and on! 

Here's our new house (these are the pictures the realtor took); I'll have to take some with "our stuff" in the house eventually: