house-hunting. part one.

house-hunting honestly sucks. it is an emotionally-draining roller coaster ride. fortunately, God is good and keeps showing up, continuing to show us that His timing is always better than ours. i will start at the beginning...

on monday we went and looked at 3 homes. i had been excitedly anticipating seeing one in particular, but we didn't even get to look because it had already sold by the time we started our showings at 4:30. the first one we looked at was ok, but definitely not something we would put an offer on. it was right on the corner of a really busy street and had a huge deck that honestly took up 80% of the backyard. with a hot tub built into it. not ideal for kids. or anyone with eyes.

we got to the second house and were immediately struck by how nice everything was. new wood floors, new granite countertops, new white trim, new, new, new. we quickly called my parents and asked them to come to the house so they could see it, knowing we were really interested. while my parents started heading our direction, we went and saw the 3rd house. ummm, no. let's just say it  had a sunken tub. i'm talking it had a step down to get in it. B. A. D. didn't take us long before we were back at the other house discussing an offer. the house had only been on the market 4 days and was obviously a flip, because it had been purchased just over two months ago at nearly $100,000 less than the current asking price. not knowing much about the current market, especially in the shoreview area, we decided to put in a low-ish offer to feel-out the seller and see if he was willing to budge at all. at 9 the next morning, our realtor had received a verbal counter-offer from the listing agent, which we accepted. the listing agent said they were aware that another offer was going to be coming in around 3:30 that afternoon (i was perplexed for a bit thinking he had meant $330,000, which was significantly over the asking price) but that they would honor our offer as long as we got the paperwork in quickly. the paperwork was updated to reflect what we had agreed upon and sent to the sellers for signatures before noon. we had the house! perry, our realtor, was going to call once they'd signed on the dotted line so we could schedule the inspection.

around 3 i started feeling antsy... what was taking so long? i called our realtor to check on the status. he said he would call the listing agent and see if everything had been signed. perry called back 15 min later and said, "well, liz, there's been a change in the game, and not in your favor..."