The Story of Our New House, Part 1

We've been thinking of moving to a bigger house for a while.  We looked at building a couple of years ago and it didn't feel like the right time.  We started looking again toward the end of last summer, we thought we were ready to build, but the builder wasn't ready for us so we waited and prayed.  Then Jeff noticed that another builder in the area where we were wanting to build had some new floor plans, we took a look at them and both of us felt that the time was right to try again.  We put our home up for sale in late December and signed a contingency with the builder, saying if we didn't sell our house we would default our up front costs to them.  We felt like this was what God was wanting us to do, even though neither of us are keen on taking risks like that.  We had a peace from God about this and decided that we would be trusting him to do what was best for our family.

For the first 2 months that our house was on the market, we didn't have anyone look at it.  Jeff was praying that we would sell our home and I was praying that we would sell our home and be able to stay in it until we could move into our new home.  We still felt like this was what God was wanting us to do.  We both struggled with trusting him and trying to see if there was something we could do, but we both understood that it was going to have to be God who did what we needed.  He knew best anyway.

It was coming right down to the line and we hadn't had very many people look at our home, but we kept praying that God would send "the one" who was to buy our house.  We had about 6 weeks to closing on the new house and still no bites on our home.  Then we had someone scheduled to look at the house and they canceled.  Then they rescheduled and two days later we had an offer on our house.  It wasn't just any offer though.  They offered us less than we would be able to accept, but they also offered to let us rent it back from them until we could move into our new home.  It sounded perfect, it was just what I was praying for, but would they come up on their price?  Jeff and I sat down and figured out what the lowest price was that we could accept, then we counter offered.  They accepted our counter offer and we were set to close about 1 week before the closing on our new house.  Then we found out that if we closed on our home before May we would actually save a little money, so we asked if they would be interested in closing earlier.  They were and we had it set up to rent the house for the next two weeks.  We closed on our home less than 30 days after we received their acceptance to our counter offer.  How good God is and he knew exactly the timing of all of this.

Part 2