Birthday Wishes Coming True!

We are in a daze! We are still rubbing our eyes and saying, "Is this just a dream?" And sometimes we say to each other, "What in the world are we doing?" We can't believe it, but we just bought our first house. We weren't even planning or really house hunting. Oh, once in a while we'd talk about our dreams for "someday in the future". And occasionally I'd look at houses just to get ideas online. But, on Jay's birthday, Sunday, Jan. 13th we decided to just take a little joy ride in the afternoon after eating out at Macaroni Grill. We drove around a few neighborhoods to take a look at some of the homes I had seen online. I didn't even know specific addresses. As we were just driving around for fun we happened to start going by one home. I told Jay, "Go back!" He said, "But there were no brochures at that sign." "Yes, there were," I said. So, he turned around and drove back. Sure enough, there were brochures with nice color pictures. We looked at it and said, "Wow, this house has everything we'd ever want!" It was in great shape, in a perfect neighborhood with mature trees, etc., etc. But we thought this would surely be a house out of our reach, financially. But, just in case, and out of curiosity we decided to try calling a real estate agent to find out how we might proceed IF we would ever want to get a house like this one. We found a realty company in the Christian business directory and called them. They linked us up with a wonderful Christian lady, named Ronni. Ronni then linked us up with a Christian mortgage lender. He teaches Crown Financial Ministries seminars to teach people how to get out of debt. He loves nothing more than to help people with their finances and to enable them to buy their first home. When we finished chatting with him I asked him how we would go about qualifying for a loan. He sat back and said, "You already are. You can start going house hunting." This was six days after Jay's birthday. The next day, a week from Jay's birthday we narrowed our search to three homes that we looked at. And it was still that first dream home that we kept coming back to as the one we loved. As it turned out, no one else was looking at the place. It had been on the market for three and a half months. The sellers are planning to move back to Iowa. Actually, the more we learned about the sellers all of a sudden I figured out that I knew them! The wife had been a parent volunteer on a weekly basis at O'Dea Elementary School helping me in the library once a week. And, not only that, but they go to our church. We found out the exciting news that we should be getting a 5% loan. But, yesterday, while I was staying home sick I got a phone call from Ronni. She said she had more good news. Yes, the sellers had signed the contract, actually we would be getting the loan at 4.875% interest rate, and no, we would not to pay anything for the appraisal, it was free! Not only that, I was even able to get our inspector to come down in price for the radon test. It seems that all of the doors have been opening wide for us to walk through. The scary part will be when the payments begin. But, we are assured that this is a gift from God. It'll be so wonderful to welcome Penny to her new home and neighborhood. What's great is that there is a good junior high school just 2 and half blocks from our new house. Wow! Here's some pictures. Looks like there'll be some packing ahead!