Buying Our First Home

February 24, 2017

It's been too long since I've posted!  Brian and I just moved into a new house, plus being pregnant has thrown me off my usual routine.  Between the move, planning for the arrival of our daughter, and doctor appointments, I've stayed pretty busy.  Things are calming down a little before our whole world is flipped upside down by the miracle of life, so I thought I'd take this time to share the story of buying our first house.  It has been a slow roller coaster, but we finally feel settled.  For the first time since we've been married, we feel like this is not a temporary living situation and there is something very peaceful and comforting about that.  It has taken a lot of praying, patience, and trust to get us here.

Brian and I lived with our parents before we got married.  A couple months before the wedding, Brian moved into a one bedroom apartment.  It was closer to his work, still close to our families, and was in a nicer part of town where things were expanding.  After the wedding, I moved in with him and we lived there for about 3 and a half years.  During that time, we decided to start looking for a house.  In early 2015, we began working with a realtor to try and find a home in an older part of town.

Prayer has always been a part of my life, especially in my marriage.  I believe God answers us, often in ways we never expected.  When Brian and I started looking for a house, we prayed for God to lead us on what to do.  After being pre-approved by the bank, we looked at several houses.  Most of them needed a lot of work, but we came across one that stood out.  It was a cute two story house with a gorgeous backyard and we really liked it.  We decided to put an offer on it and were accepted.  We signed papers with the realtor and were very excited.  Our prayer was that if this was the right house for us, everything would go smoothly, but if it wasn't, we asked God to throw in a monkey wrench.

Brian went to meet with a loan officer to begin the process while I was babysitting.  After the meeting, he called me and was trying to stay composed, but I could sense how upset he was.  Since I hadn't been at my current job for at least 2 years, we would not be approved for the loan we wanted to use.  Our only two options were to let the house go or use all our savings to get it.

We were both really disappointed because we had come so far.  Part of me wanted to just do what we had to do to get this house.  But Brian convinced me that would not be wise.  We decided to look at this as the monkey wrench we had prayed for and let the house go.  I remember feeling guilty because it was my fault it didn't work out.  But God had us the whole time.  It's times like these I'm glad I don't follow my heart.  "The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked, who can know it." Jeremiah 17:9  

This is a picture I found around the time we let the house go.  It was a reminder to trust God.

After a time of sadness, we came out of this experience with a refreshed mindset.  We gave thanks to God for protecting us from making a spontaneous decision.  We realized the area we had been planning to move was becoming quite run down.  We would have been settling because we really didn't want a two story house anyway.  Looking back, we're so happy it didn't work out.

Even if we weren't going to buy a house, we still felt it was time to move out of the one bedroom apartment we had lived in since we got married.  In April 2016, we moved to another apartment down the road.  It was a newer two bedroom place and we felt good about having more space.

Around this time, my sister and her husband had also been trying to find a house.  They ended up building in a new development right across the street from the apartment complex we had just moved from.  I loved the neighborhood and location and dreamed of being able to build in a place like that.  But I felt like it wouldn't happen because of our financial situation.

Several months went by and we watched my sister's house being built.  She had been trying to convince us to at least check into the process of building there.  We started looking into to it, not too seriously, and praying about what God wanted us to do.  On July 31, 2016, we started the process of building a home in this brand new neighborhood.  I remember driving home that day talking to Brian about how this felt different.  

It took about 7 months for our dream home to be built.  It's a one story, 3 bedroom, 2 bath house and I'm extremely happy with how it turned out.  The whole process went very smoothly.  My parents ended up selling their home and building in our neighborhood as well, so now my whole family lives here.  

I can't give enough credit to God for orchestrating all this.  The main point I wanted to get across was we do not have a full picture when going through struggles.  I don't want to sound cliche, but I believe everything really does happen for a reason.  God has provided for me time and time again and He blesses those who trust Him.  Relying on our own limited understanding is not enough to navigate through this complicated life.  Peace comes when we surrender everything to Jesus and choose to trust in His plans for our lives.