Moving is hard. Closing is harder.

July 10, 2016

by — Posted in Life at Home

Thanks to the wonderful support of our friends and family, we successfully moved into our new home. But we’re not closed yet.

Special thanks to my mom and dad for watching our girls as we struggled through a difficult week and made a difficult decision to go ahead with the move even though the closing didn’t happen. And to our friend Chris and my dad who helped Ansen move our ridiculously heavy refrigerator. To my sister, Erica, for watching the girls while we were in and out moving stuff, even though they did NOT want to be away. To my mom, the ultimate tetris player and head perseverer to get everything moved, even when it started raining. To my dad and dad-in-law, Steve, the pack mules for trucking everything into the house. To my brother-in-law, Andrew, for cleaning and replacing every bulb in the house. To my sister-in-law Arielle, for cleaning everything else imaginable. To Arielle and my mom-in-law for decorating my living room. To Maddie, for making my bed. To everyone who kept going back to the old house to get the “rest of the stuff” in the rain, I was so consumed with the kitchen, I didn’t even know who all went, but I’m thankful. Pictures to come!

There was a “hiccup” with some paperwork on our buyers end (and not their fault, I might add). Nothing devastating, but enough to throw closing off… by TWO week! And thanks to the 4th of July holiday weekend taking a day out of the work week, or we could have probably closed last Friday. But now it has to be this Friday due to our buyer’s work schedule. Of course, this has caused a scary domino affect that we can’t close on the new house and our sellers (and friends) had already started the process of a building loan, for which they need their equity. Since we’re already in the house, we are renting from them to help cover their mortgage until it all closes (splitting it until Friday), but the situation is far from ideal for anyone.

It’s easy for our minds to all rush to the worst case scenario. This loan falls threw. We no longer have a buyer. We’re living in a house we don’t own, (with $7K in new floors!) covering their full mortgage. We have to find a way to own two houses and try to sell the other quickly. While we can probably make that work for a while, it’s certainly not optimal and for too long, could be disastrous. The panic set in pretty quick and we were both just sick to our stomachs. Thankfully, our girls were at Nana’s house, so they didn’t have to bear the brunt of our emotional distress. Panic turned to outrage, at the bank, at the loan officer, at anyone who gave us bad news.

But God is faithful. He has turned that outrage into frustration. And that frustration into reluctance. The reluctance has slowly turned into acceptance. And now we have hope because there is a light at the end of the tunnel. We hope to hear Monday (or at least Tuesday) that our loan documents are final and we have an official closing date of this Friday. And once we have that, everyone can breathe a little easier.

We keep reminding ourselves that just because God has called us to do something, doesn’t mean everything will go smoothly. It had until this point and we patted ourselves on the back for “following” God (when really, he dropped this house in our laps). How quickly we question if we’re doing the right thing or if we made the right decision when the waters start getting choppy. He is faithful, though, and he will bring us through to the other side. He already has plans for our new house, hosting youth on their way home to Texas from a mission trip in a few weekends. And I know this is why he has given us this house, if we can just trust him to get us through this part. I’ll keep you posted! And picture, I promise.