To Lie in Bed 10 more Minutes or to Blog... That is the Question

Greetings from Grand Rapids, MN. Bart and I are training together here today. And just in case you're wondering where it is ... let me just say it is FAR AWAY from Mankato. Total travel time was probably almost six hours.

So yesterday was quite the day. We got the kids off to school and then drove up to the Crystal area. We saw 8 houses in 3 hours, which is a LOT. Walked up and down a lot of stairs and I don't do that quickly these days...

We ended up making the decision to buy the last house we looked at and filled out paperwork to make an offer. I'm waiting to post it all this time in case something falls through (we haven't even told the kids yet), but it was the cheapest of those we looked at. It was also the closest to the city (as opposed to a more subueban feel) and the nicest inside. It was in the middle as far as size goes.... It was purchased by a company in December and completely remodeled. Nobody has been in the house since the remodel was done so inside it feels like a brand new house.

Even though there's always that "I hope we're doing the right thing" feeling when you start talking about that much money, we had a pretty good feeling about the house. It's farther away from the church than we had hoped, and not close to any of the three schools our kids want to attend, but it's just a really nice home... and we feel good about not spending our maximum -- in fact, we are about 40,000 below what we qualified for, which I think is a good decision.

We also have an offer on an as-is price for our home which is a miracle. However, we are going to have to do some creative financing to make all this work out as we are upside down on our house by quite a bit... buying our first home in 2006 with no down payment probably wasn't the wisest choice we ever made, but who could have predicted that kind of crash in the real estate market?

We love the people who want to move into our house and so once that's a done deal I'll tell you more about that.

We also have a lead on a possibility for Rand so all these miracles just might be happening about the same time.

Thanks to those of you who have been praying about this. It seems that God had a pretty good plan all along and we just had to wait to see it all unfold. He's kinda like that sometimes.

I posted on my Facebook that it would be nice if those of us who don't look physically beautiful on the outside could have a sign like the one that was posted in front of one of the houses we looked at....