Last Friday, my sweetheart and I did something big! We have been talking for a while that eventually we want to be in the same household so we can spend more time together and less time driving across town to each other’s respective homes. We have gone to quite a few Open Houses, but hadn’t found a house that had everything, or at least enough of what we each wanted that we could agree on it.

Ted wanted a three stall garage so we can fit both our vehicles in and still allow him to have space for his tool chests and to give him space to work on projects. I wanted a yard where I can enjoy flowers and trees and can feed the birds and squirrels. We both wanted a master bath and a kitchen with lots of storage. We found a beautiful home, actually one of the first ones we saw, but the asking price was too far above our price point. It was absolutely gorgeous and so very well maintained. We agreed that something like this house would be perfect for us. As a Catholic who loves asking the saints for their intercession, I asked St. Anthony to help us find a home like this one, but with a bit lower price. He has never failed to help me when I need to find something, so I had faith that he would come through.

On August 29th, the listing price was reduced by 25,000.00 which put it closer into the range we were looking for. After looking at a couple more Open Houses where we found ourselves saying, “We need to fix this.” and “This would have to be changed/updated, we both kept coming back to the house that had almost everything we both wanted. We set up a time to go back and look a bit more closely at it on Sep. 18th. When we saw it again, we were in agreement that it was a home we could both see ourselves being happy in.

We decided that we would like to put an offer in, but first we had to get pre-approval, so we started the process that evening of getting all of our financial information submitted to a mortgage broker. After a couple days of submitting paperwork and clarifying income, assets and the like, we were approved! Because we both have substantial equity in our homes, we are able to get a loan without immediately selling either of our other homes. Late Friday afternoon, after hearing we were approved, we put in an offer that was 19,000.00 below the lowered asking price. The sellers had 24 hours to consider our offer. We were hopeful that it would be accepted, but also prepared for a counter offer.

Late Saturday morning, we were discussing what our next move should be. Would we counter again if they countered? How much were we willing to increase our bid if we needed to? Should we look at other properties before we put another offer in? We hadn’t been talking very long when Ted’s phone rang. It was the realtor saying that our offer had been accepted with no counter offer! Wow! We are so excited!! Now the work begins to get our homes ready to list. Being able to move things from both of our houses will help them to show better. Now I will ask St. Joseph to help find a family to purchase my home and one to purchase Ted’s home. It makes me happy to think of a family enjoying the house that I love so much. In the next months, we will dedicate ourselves to spiffing up our properties and making them the perfect home for other families who will be as happy to get them as we were to get our new home.

While we have a lot of work ahead of us, I believe it was worth taking the risk and getting our new chapter started!