Today is a Happy post 😀 as I am soooo excited to announce that my husband and I finally purchased our 1st and Forever Home!!
Where it Started
If you’ve been following me for a few years, then you know how badly I’ve wanted to move out of our apartment where we were living in for 11 years! Much of the anguish to move was due to trauma I endured from some terrible neighbors who deliberately/intentionally hurt me. The suffering was acute and real developing into extreme PTSD and multiple mental breakdowns. Perhaps, in my 20s I could’ve have stood it better but not in my 60s.
Anyway, our dream was to own a home and we thought at times if it would happen. We didn’t have money saved for a down payment, options were scarce living on the coast and we were in the worst home buying season ever! Our price point for a home wasn’t high enough to give us many choices and most of the homes we looked at needed a LOT of work. Some weren’t even safe to live in!
Would the Dream ever Become Reality?
We knew we needed a ready-to-move-in home and we also knew we didn’t want to leave the coast where God brought us. So, we stuck out it out for 14 months until we found it! And, it turned out to be the best gift God could give us: a new-build, stick-built home.
Only one person owned it before us and he was a Christian and just a sweet gentleman. When we toured the home, I spent about an hour just talking with him. He loved this home and only had to move due to his declining health.
Before we found out about our home, we had already gone through 4 houses (inspections and all and 5 different lenders, losing a lot of money in the process and by the time we found our home (5th house) we were just spent. It was such an emotional, upheaval process with so many things that had to fit into place for us to move.
The Day Finally Came
Yet, none of our issues fazed God one bit! After all the months of waiting, anguishing and paperwork, we got all the approvals! As first timers, we qualified for two different programs to pay our down payment and closing costs.
And, check this out!, we had our closing at the end of January 2024 in Burger King! Yes! You read that right! Our closing officer traveled to us because our truck is in no condition to go out of town.
We got a conventional loan with a low interest rate and our mortgage payments were more than affordable! I even got to retire this year! Talk about miracles after miracles! This house checked off about 95% of our boxes! The 5% were just things I would’ve liked like a kitchen island, but believe me I’m thrilled to have a full size kitchen even if it’s not large enough for an island.
The apartment was 750 sq. foot with 1 bathroom and the kitchen was a walk-up space, not a lot of counter space for cooking so going from that to just over 1,000 sq. feet, 2-story is incredible! Our home reminds me a lot of the townhouse apartments I’ve lived in prior. The stairway has a landing so there’s not 17 stairs straight up and I love that because as I’m much older, getting up and down stairs would be a real concern.
God met all our needs and gave us our desires too! I’m so happy our realtor stuck it out with us all that time through thick and thin and He brought the right lenders to us at the end of the journey who fought for us believing in our convictions and commitment to the Lord’s direction for our life.
The pictures were taken the day we got the keys and the previous owner even had the house professionally cleaned for us and he was moved out in just shy of one week after closing so we moved in a day early and a total of three days were totally moved in!
God seems to move real fast once the puzzle pieces are in place and I think it was because He was making it up to us for all the days and nights we had to wait for approvals, homes to come on the market, signing paperwork, etc.
Now we get to decorate any way we want, we get to live on our terms. We get to live normally and not in our truck which we did during the last few years of apartment living due to the neighbors around us.
Hubby and I are both so grateful, humbled and super excited to start this new chapter in our lives. And, the healing for both us begins.
