Finally. (eta floorplan)

The Lord has answered our prayer for a home! Yesterday I took our final month's rent to the management, along with our thirty-day's notice. On April 8th we will close on Our House and begin moving! Hurray!

If you click on the link above, you'll notice that this is NOT the house we made an offer on back in October (which, unless you are a FB friend of mine, you won't know anything about...) That one was a short sale and the bank never did get back to us with a final word on our offer. Yes, that's right. We made the offer in October, and this is April, and they never got back a final word to us.

The story of this house is that back in February, in depths of despair over the length of time it was taking to hear back from the bank about our first offer, and wallowing in self-pity over my eternal captivity in this tiny apartment, I noticed a new property whose price had just dropped within our price range. Elfstone Drive. How cute, I thought. Elfstone Drive, in Casselberry. It sounds like an address from a fairytale. Let's go look at it. Just for kicks.

So we did. And we loved it. It's the perfect house. The yard is perfect. The kitchen is perfect. The pool is perfect. It has vaulted ceilings, a fireplace and a waterslide. What more could you ask for?

It was riiight at the upper edge of our price range. We took all of one night to talk it over. The next day we drew up an offer and submitted it on the Friday before President's Day. Early that Monday I had a notice from our listing engine that the price had just dropped $12K

???

Yep. $12 THOUSAND.

We spent the holiday rushing around, coming up with a new offer based on the new price, quickly submitting it, fingers crossed that they'd not realize that we were the same people who'd just submitted the (much) higher offer that they'd just seen that morning.

No such luck. We got a call that night saying they would accept our first offer. Bleh. We declined. They countered the next day with the info that there were multiple offers on the house and all parties had till noon on Wed to submit their highest and best offers.

OH, the agonies, OH the doubts, the second-guessing, and the trepidation... We spent ALL NIGHT trying to come up with an unbeatable, but still affordable offer. We submitted it the next day with only an hour or two to spare. And then we waited.

And waited.

And waited.

And then on Friday, we got the word. Our offer had been accepted! Hallelujah!! The house was ours!! In the weeks since then, we've been dancing around to all the bureaucratic red tape and vagaries that are the mortgage industry in Florida right now. But now the final piles of paperwork have been printed, signed and faxed, the last rent is paid and I"m picking out my paint colors! On April 8th we'll sign the closing documents and we will own 2200 sq ft, a pool (and waterslide) and over a 1/4 acre of the state of Florida.

Praise the Lord!