Hope Springs Eternal

Our House Selling Saga...

Meg, over at Life in a Nutshell has it pegged. The realtor we have right now is a family friend, so we really don't have a poor notion of him at all, but, we've just got to laugh at Meg's hilarious depiction of realtors, as we've had several now, and they are not all created equal, let me tell you!

We've had a house on the market here, and there constantly now for almost five years! And it's not because we're house flipping or anything.

First, starting about five years ago, we tried to sell our farm on the Eastern Slope of Colorado, and found out that there's just not much of a market for a pioneer-vintage home with its own forty acres of prairie. Not even with barns, outbuildings and mucho fencing. Not even with a landscaped yard, a baseball diamond, a playhouse, treehouse, sandbox, and a short walk to an awesome town library. The people-with-money-to-buy want a new house it seems. Even though our property has real, genuine, highly coveted mature trees. They'd rather have a new house, even if it's a cheaply-built modular, on forty flat acres of nothing. At the same price as ours with all the stuff.

=sigh=

It's not our fault people are crazy.

But, then we found this guy who wanted to run a horse operation, who loved the place, and had letters stating his pre-qualification.

Sounded good...

So, we moved over to Western Colorado because we had the farm under what-looked-like-at-the-time, (AHAHAHAHA!) an iron clad contract; the house had even passed the inspection and everything. So, with me pregnant, getting ready to be stuck on bedrest, and knowing that it would be about six months of bedrest, we decided we'd better just take the leap and move over to where there was a school we trusted. Trying to run a house and farm and teach five children while on bedrest was not something I wanted to tackle again (and I knew I didn't want to do it because I'd done it before!).

So, we moved.

And then, of course, that deal fell through. In the course of the whole time that place has been on the market, at least three other deals have fallen through. Usually because people couldn't qualify....

But, we had, in the meantime, bought this house, the River House, over here in Western Colorado. A nice old house, with "good bones," but one that we got cheap because it needed some work. We took two years to make it livable, and fell in love with this part of the state.

Then my husband's long term contract ended, and he decided it'd be prudent at this juncture to jump off the consulting roller coaster, so we were without a job for several months, while he lined up a new position.

And where else would that new position be, but back on the Eastern Slope of Colorado?

NOW we know why God didn't answer all those prayers about selling the farm! He knew we were going to end up living there again. Amazing, isn't it? His answer to our pestering was "I have something better in mind... because I know what the future holds and you don't! And you gotta wonder if He didn't add, "So quitcher belly-achin'!"

So, anyway, it's back to the old farm, and now we're selling the Western Slope house.

Let me tell you, we could write a book about things that can go wrong in house deals. And we've gotten really good at all the tricks necessary to get a house ready in a jiffy for a showing. We're getting so good at this, we're almost professionals. Or well, I guess to qualify as a professional anything, you have to make money at it, don't you?

Anyway, we have a supposed contract on the River House coming in today.We know better than to get our hopes up, yet hope being a cardinal virtue... Well, we know we can't give it up. We do have certain hope in God's perfect plan for us. We know that He'll do what's best, and that's what we're praying for: His Will to be done. Still, can't help but hope He doesn't want us to go bankrupt.

And, He did say, "Ask and ye shall receive..."

So.... if anyone out there has a couple seconds to send up a word for us, could you please ask Him, pretty please, could this maybe be the one deal that will go through? We don't ask so that we'll make money on the transaction, but just so that we won't lose our shirts. We simply don't make enough money to pay for two houses. We never have!

And my blue-haired-grandma-retirement-jeep fund is already gone.

Darn it.