here we are

Let me first say that there are a multitude of reasons why we haven’t blogged lately - and they’re better than “we’ve been really busy.”  :-)  First of all, Apple’s transition from .Mac to MobileMe didn’t go extremely smoothly and those of you who’ve tried to comment on our site have gotten a tiny glimpse of our frustration.  Anyhow, it seems to be fixed now, so that’s great news!

Now - go grab yourself a cup of coffee and a muffin because this is quite the story and you’ll need to settle in ...

Most of you know that we’ve been renters for all of our married life.  Without going into great detail, suffice it to say we made our fair share of financial mistakes early on in our marriage and have worked very hard to get to the point of stability where we are today.  Anyhow, for the past 4+ years, we’ve been in the BEST of rental situations.  We have a beautiful townhome in an awesome neighborhood and have always dreamed that someday we’d be able to buy it from the man from whom we currently rent.

You think you know where we’re going with this little story, but (we promise) you don’t.  Hahaha.  Keep reading.

About two months ago, our landlord called us.  We knew that he had been through a divorce this last year and that things had gotten fairly strapped for him financially.  He was calling to inform us that he would not be able to renew our lease when it was up in July of 2009.  He did, in fact, offer to sell us the townhome if we were able to get a mortgage.

About that same time, a woman from our church named Therese asked Angie and I if we would be willing to provide an evening of music for her family’s reunion which would be held here in the Twin Cities.  Interestingly enough, Therese is a mortgage broker - God moment #1.

We talked with Therese that night and asked if she’d be willing to help us determine if we could be pre-qualified for a mortgage and she excitedly agreed.  We had to jump through a few hoops, but in the end we were able to get pre-approval to purchase our townhome.

As you might imagine, our landlord was elated.  We made him an offer and even though it was slightly less than what he owed, it was an amount he could deal with and the convenience factor was huge.  We agreed, signed our purchase agreement and headed down the path to home ownership.  

THEN ... there was the simple matter of the appraisal.  Ouch.

In what has (sadly) become a common occurrence in the current housing market, our house appraised for $15,000  LESS than what we had offered and, obviously, the bank wouldn’t write us a mortgage for an offer like that.  Now, of course, this is fairly good news for us since it’s an incredibly good buyers market but unfortunately, after talking it over with our landlord, he couldn’t afford to take that kind of a hit on the sale of this townhome.

Parenthetically, there is a government down payment assistance program called the Nehemiah Program which allows a seller to contribute to the down payment of a buyer.  We, of course, we’re taking advantage of this program because (as most of you know) all of our money is tied up in adoption.   This program ends on September 15.  Yup - September 15.

Sooooooooo ... we found out from our landlord on Friday, August 29 that he could not afford to sell us this house (that would be our 10th anniversary - God moment #2).  In complete sadness, we called Therese and gave her the news.  Surprisingly, she was far more optimistic than we were about the prospect of us STILL getting into a place of our own!  She hooked us up with a realtor within minutes and we were house shopping by early afternoon.

After looking at several townhomes, we came to THE ONE.  It’s actually the same builder’s brand new, bigger version of the home that we’re living in now (which we love VERY much).  They had just finished construction, so the unit is sitting there just waiting for us to buy it and they had just lowered the price by $15,000.  We decided that day that this was, indeed, the place for us!  We came home and looked at many other places online, but knew that this was the place for us.  

So on Saturday, August 30 (the first day of our 11th year of marriage), we signed the papers to buy our first home (God moment #58390101012 - we left a few out).  That was 11 days ago.  We’re closing tomorrow at 3:30 and will move in this weekend.

Go back and read that last sentence one more time.

We signed the papers less than two weeks ago and are closing TOMORROW. Phew.  Crazy.  And another incredibly cool thing:  we purchased this home for about $5,000 less than what we had originally offered for the townhome where we’re currently residing.  The new one is bigger, newer and has a lot of cool upgrades ... and cost us less.  Wow.

So now you see ... we’ve been a itsy bitsy teeeeeeny weeeeeeny little bit busy packing and getting ready for our big move!  We’re so incredibly excited and can’t wait to get settled in.  We’ll most definitely get more pictures added as soon as we get settled in and our internet connected.

Thanks for checking back in everyone!