His Plan

If I thought home-selling was stressful, the home buying process can put your stomach into knots!! But, in a GOOD WAY!! :-)

Let's see if I can go through the time line pretty quickly:

Monday - Receive verbal offer on our home
Tuesday - Sign contract & submit counter offer
Wednesday - Counter offer accepted and Contract signed!
Thursday - Contract makes it's way to the title company; inspection on our house.
Friday - day of rest?
Saturday - HOUSE HUNTING! (and so, our new story begins)
We saw 11 houses on Saturday. The 9th house was THE ONE. My stomach hurt, I wanted this house so badly! We looked at those two more afterward, just to be sure. We were SURE. Our Realtor started putting paperwork together. We went home to get pre-approved online.
Sunday - after Church, we meet the Realtor and go look at the house again with Mom & the kiddos. They loved it too! We sign the contract and it is submitted to the seller's agent.

* A couple things to note here. 1) This house had been on the market for SIX days when we saw it. 2) The day we received an offer on our house was the day this house went on the market. Coincidence? I don't think so. Thank you Lord! Thank you St. Joseph! *

We're still on Sunday...
We go back home and try to enjoy the rest of the day, eagerly awaiting word that our contract has been accepted. Around 5pm, our Realtor texts us and says to call him for an update. Yay! Well, he starts with "Don't Panic" Uh-oh! Apparently, on Sunday, there were FOUR CONTRACTS offered on this house! I couldn't believe it! He said two were thrown out immediately. Ours was still in the top two, and their agent had recommended they choose ours. Thank goodness we knew a good thing when we saw it and offered asking price, choosing to negotiate on closings costs instead. I hang up the phone, seriously tied up in knots.
Around 10pm, I get another text saying to call if it's not too late for an update. I call and he tells us that it looks as if they are going with our offer, but will probably be countering just a tad on our closing request. However, until we have a signed contract in hand, it's hard to rest easy!

Monday - (One week since we had first word of an offer on our house! WOW! this is happening fast!) 9:30am - our Realtor has a signed contract in hand! We're ready to move forward on this house! I'm continuing to pray at this point that the sale of our house progresses smoothly.
1:30pm - the inspection report comes back on our house and the ONLY thing our buyers want is for us to get the A/C serviced! Consider it DONE!!!

This afternoon we started asking questions about moving up our closing on the new house so we can move straight in. We'll get that figured out in the next few days. However, as God would have it, (and I alluded to in my previous post), we were blessed with a rent house to use for the interim period if needed!! For a mere $400/mo plus utilities, we can stay in this 5050 square foot mansion that is priced WAY out of our league!! While it would be quite neat to "live" in a place like that, I truly hope we are able to synch our closing dates so we only have to move ONCE. But if not, I choose NOT to complain. God has blessed us with more than we could imagine! We are so grateful!

While all this time, I knew God had a plan for us, I couldn't begin to imagine why in the world it took SO LONG for our house to sell! I sure would have preferred an email straight from Heaven saying "Lori, just hang in there till March '10...my plan will be revealed.", I now am beginning to see the perfect sequence of events only HE could have laid out so perfectly.



**I'll be sure to give an update on the house soon. I'll be at the inspection tomorrow and will take some pictures. :)