Our House Story: Part 4

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{Part 1} {Part 2} {Part 3}

To pick up where I left off, we had just moved into our friends' house which we were planning to buy and were supposed to close on in a matter of days. Things immediately started going wrong. First it was just little things, like having trouble finding homes for all our stuff and the outlet for the dryer not matching our own. We also found out that there was a problem with the title. Somehow the boundaries listed in the title had changed during the 1998 sale. For some reason that was not a problem then, nor was it a problem three years ago when our friends bought the house. But for us it meant our closing was pushed back indefinitely until it could be resolved. But we already lived in the house! So, we talked with our friends and thankfully they were incredibly awesome through the whole ordeal. They offered to rent the house to us in the meantime. We were hoping this would only mean a few extra days or a week at most before it was resolved.

The second day that we lived there, Scott and his dad were shopping at Lowe's while his mom and I were unpacking. She was in the kitchen and I was in the hallway. Let me pause and remind you that there is an upstairs attic apartment in that house which can be rented out. There was currently a renter living there. Okay, back to the story. I heard strange noises coming from the living room, but I didn't see anything. I turned back to the box I was unpacking and then heard a VERY loud crash in the living room! I turned quickly and all I saw was a falling light and tons of ceiling and drywall crumbling down. My immediate thought was that the ceiling fan must have fallen. Then I saw a leg! And realized it was the upstairs renter! Hanging from my living room ceiling! He crawled back up into his apartment as Scott's mom and I shouted up at him to make sure he was okay. The whole living room was covered in dust and drywall. My heart was racing. I didn't know what happened, but assumed he must have just been walking along in his apartment and the entire floor fell through. I kept thinking... I do not own this house!!! What do you do??

We ran upstairs to check on him. Thankfully he was fine. Also thankfully, it turns out the house was not falling apart. He was actually crawling around in the crawl space between the levels looking for his girlfriend's cat who had gotten in there and had accidentally stepped off the beams onto the sheet rock. Whew! That's one worry to set aside. But it still remained that my living room was trashed, the ceiling had a massive hole in it, and I was living in a house that I did not yet own.

My friends are amazing, Godly people and they somehow managed to not freak out at all. They had someone come out and fix the hole and all was well. But the guy couldn't come out until Tuesday and it was Saturday. So meanwhile we had a gaping hole in our ceiling and all I could think about was all the AC blowing straight up there and running up our power bill. But, aside from that, the crisis was over.

We found out on Monday that the problem with the title was being resolved and we should be able to close within a week or so. Then on Wednesday we got a call from the bank. I should have also mentioned before that we were originally planning to do an FHA loan (which was not a problem when our friends bought the house...see a pattern here?), but were told after the appraisal that because of the attic apartment we would have to do a conventional loan. This would mean putting 5% down instead of 3.5%. It was a little more than we anticipated, but we figured it out. But the call on Wednesday from the bank told us another story. Our rep explained that because of the attic apartment, it is considered investment property. Due to regulations set by Freddie Mac, we would have to put down 20% to buy the house. TWENTY PERCENT! Who has that?? Not us, that was for sure!

Well, this pretty much brought us to a halt. We went into problem solving mode and thought about switching to another bank. We contacted the bank our friends had used when they bought the house. The lady there explained that if the appraiser listed it as a Mother-in-Law Suite it would not be a problem. But because of the separate utilities and the renter who was currently living there, it is likely that an appraiser would have no choice but to call it what it really was...an apartment. She offered to go through the entire process with us again from scratch, and hope that their appraiser listed it differently.

I was so tired. Gosh, I was tired. I cried and cried. How could we get this far and everything just fall apart? I admit I was angry with God. I felt so certain that He called us to make this move. Why were things not working out? Scott and I were a complete mess. We prayed and prayed and prayed some more. And it certainly seemed like God was steering us away from that house. But why? Why call us to move there and then call us away? Did we just read the signals wrong before? Were we reading them wrong this time?

We had dinner with our pastor and talked about it. He obviously couldn't tell us what to do, but he gave us some great advice for seeking God and listening to our hearts. And there was one thing that was a blinding, flashing light that I had been trying to ignore all summer long. Scott is the spiritual head of our household. And he had bad feelings about this for weeks. I had been exhausting myself trying to encourage, inspire, and convince Scott that this was what we should be doing. One night, as we were laying together and praying I said one of the most difficult things to say. I told him, "I will do whatever you think we should do. I'm not going to fight it anymore." He was against that attitude at first. He didn't want me to feel like I had to back down and not have a say in such a big decision. But it wasn't that. The bottom line is Scott is the head. We were both seeking God with willing hearts. If God wanted us in that house, He would keep us there through Scott. If He wanted us to move, He would do that through Scott, too. So we prayed again, and I promised to trust the spiritual guidance of my husband.

(The next part is the BEST part! Coming soon!)

{Part 5}