A house hunting we've gone, and gone, and gone, and gone ......

There is NO real estate slump in this town! We have been looking for close to 2 months now. We have found several houses that we have liked. Many of them have sold before we could get an offer on, or someone else put a better competing offer on. We then found two houses that we like as well, but neither owner would budge on the price, both of which were priced about 10,000 + above other similar houses. We finally had thought we found the house that we wanted, and the night we went to see it our realtor took us to see another house as well. We looked at both, and had some trouble making a decision. One was an older(50 years or so, stone house practically downtown, just what we were looking for. However, that house needed many updates and was only two beds, and one bath on the main floor. The basement had some potential but need a lot of work. The second house was in a subdivision on the edge of town and is huge! The house was foreclosed on we believe, and is selling for approx. 2/3 value. It has about 900 more sq. ft. than our old house, but the utilities are almost even, if not a fraction less. It has plenty of room for our family to grow, and to house the church for now with no competing space. After so many houses, and so many dead-ends, we are hoping that this will be the end of this journey. It is more house than we wanted, and newer than what we wanted as well, but if it is what God has for us, we will take it. Kelley measured the distance in the van and it is only two-tenths of a mile farther, one way, for her to walk to the post office and bank as well. We put our final offer on it Friday, and are now having to waiting until after the holiday is over, and the bankers are back to find out if they are going to accept it or not.

May God bless you as you strive to follow Him.

Back from the GA and house hunting

Well, we made it back from the Assembly. It was great to be there and worship with and see all of our friends. We really enjoyed the services. The Spirit was there in great measure. I did get a little tired of the stairs to the balcony, but I guess that is what you get when you have a little girl who doesn't do well sitting in service for a week straight. I went back and watch/listened to part of the service I had to preach in. Man, I have too much of a southern twang while I was preaching. I have a bad habit of picking up speech habits of the locals after I have been in area for a day or two. Also, apparently, I have a tendency to preach with more of a southern twang when in front of a crowd. I have no idea where I picked that up. Anyway, enough about me. There was a lot of good preaching. Some of which I am going to have to go back and watch since I spent a lot of time out of the auditorium whenever Anna couldn't handle sitting still any longer.

Our house hunt is continuing. We put an offer on a house before we left for TN. We found out while we were down at the GA that someone else offered cash for the house and the bank took that deal. That is 5 houses that we have looked at, 4 that we definitely wanted, that have sold. The real estate market definitely is not slow around here, at least in the price range we are looking. We have an offer on a house right now that we are waiting to hear back from. The first offer wasn't accepted so the person made a counter offer that was only $400 less than the asking price. There is no way that we are going to pay that, so we made another counter up $1,000 from our original. We will see how things go. We are hoping and praying to get things settled soon.

Strive for the prize