Whew! -- The last 3 months have been very busy for us, to say the least.  Let me recap what has been going on...

In February, Katie and I decided that "now was the time" to try and sell our condo and buy a house.  We had started feeling cramped in our space and the home prices / interest rates were easily enough to tempt us to at least start looking.  We agreed to only start looking for a house once we found a buyer for the condo because we didn't want to end up paying two mortgages at one time.  It would be too easy to fall in love with our "must have" home before the condo sold and come to find out selling it would take much longer than we ever anticipated (so we figured at least).  FSBO was the route we chose and it only took 5 weeks to get an acceptable offer. 

Once we signed the contract we knew we had to find a house fast, or move into a apartment temporarily but that wasn't our preference for obvious reasons.  We found a realtor and began the intensive search.  If my company pulled a report on my internet usage in the month of March, I am pretty sure some eyebrows would be raised with all my traffic to HAR.com.  We searched, and searched.  Then we became less picky and searched some more.  It become obvious fairly soon that it was slim pickings out there.  There were plenty of foreclosures and undesirable dumps but the owners of the "good ones" seemed to be hanging on and not wanting to sell in the midst of the deep downturn in the economy.  That was our guess at least.

We finally found a house in late March.  We happened upon a nice house in a great neighborhood that had a good elementary school and was still a fairly short commute to work for both of us.  We really liked it when we saw it for the first time.  It wasn't without its issues, though.  The kitchen had to go.  A wall needed to be torn down to open things up.  It was going to cost some $ but the price was right and we were ready to do it.  When we talked to the owner and asked all the usual questions that any home buyer wants to know, we glossed over his revelation that the house was not only in flood zone but had gotten water inside during hurricane Ike and tropical storm Allison in 2001.  After we prayed about it and signed the contract I started to become increasingly uneasy about the flood issue.  We reasoned that flood insurance would take care of another flood and there were things we could do to prepare and prevent (i.e. sandbags).  Even so, it was grating on me.  I prayed that if this was not God's best for us that he would have the deal fall through in a completely obvious way.  I remember saying to God, "an obvious way, like 'mortgage declined' kind of obvious way".  One evening we were at Home Depot picking our new cabinets and the phone rang.  It was the owner saying he couldn't sell the house to us for personal reasons.  "What!?"  How could he back out of a legally binding contract?  Well, we simply took it as a sign from God that this wasn't the house God had for us and a feeling of relief came over me.

Since we loved the neighborhood the house was in we went back to take a look at another house in the area (on the same street, actually) we had given a cursory look a few weeks previous.  In fact, we hadn't even seen the inside of it.  We had originally seen this house listed on Craigslist, actually.  We both liked the house when we went back for a second look.  It probably helped that if we didn't find a house in the next week or so we would have no place to live.  Haha.  No, actually we really did think it was a great house that would be a good place for us to live.  It was well taken care of and had all of our "must haves" included.   24 hours after the first house fell through, we had a verbal agreement to buy 1355 Del Norte. 

We moved in about 10 days later and began to make it our own.  Fortunately, it was very move-in ready and we only needed to focus on minor improvement to suit our own preferences.  Light fixtures, furnishing, mailbox, landscape tweaks, new dishwasher, etc.  Nothing major (yet).  Once we closed on our new home, it didn't take much reflection and retrospection to realize with how very happy we were to have found and bought this house.  We loved it more with each day.  It was perfect for us in so many ways.  We believe God brought us to this house via a detour (house purchase falling through weeks before closing) to increase our trust in Him.  It was quite a ride but it feels so good to have a home we love and feel so blessed.

So, that's pretty much what has been consuming our lives for the past few months (and why our blog has been silent for awhile).  Please take a look at some pictures of our new pad!