The Hunt Begins

The hunt for our homestead came at a time that was really unexpected. Now to understand what I mean by this you will need to know that my wife and I have wanted a homestead for many years. After we bought our little house in the town of Rittman a few weeks after our wedding, we began working around our little yard. The lot in Rittman was 50x150 ft. Talk about a small lot! But it was enough to get us involved with gardens, apple trees (my specialty), grapes, strawberries, and other things. And the love for these things wasn't a new found one for me. I had been wanting to find some land actually before we got married, but things just didn't work out. As a child I had butchered animals, raised some family pigs, lived on a farm for a brief period, and just the normal things a kid does growing up in the country edge of suburbia.

So after we got into living a more frugal lifestyle, we really became addicted to the idea of building our own homestead. As you know from some of my previous post, I believe that we ALL make choices in our lives. We choose to do some things and not others, the reasons are varied and many. Amy and I chose to live a very frugal life so that she could stay home after Hosanna was born. We purposely avoided new cars, much to the chagrin of some of our coworkers. I can still hear them, "Hey, Bob, when are you going to get rid of that rusty old truck?" Now don't think the desire to drive a new, clean, bright truck, SUV, or car wasn't there. We just had to make a choice. We had to choose to have other people raise our children while Amy and I both worked to pay for two new cars, a better house and a big screen TV or we had to choose to live the way our grandparents did and to settle for what we could afford and just make ends meet. We were much happier than most of our friends around us. Even though I was working in the rat race, I wasn't a part of it. And as I said, I knew that God wanted me to work with youth, I just didn't know the "where" and "when" of it.

As I said previously, I figured that out finally. So I took a major pay cut. To explain "MAJOR" let me say that I make in one year about 4 - 5 times less than I did in my last job. But don't feel sorry for me, it was a choice. We are richer for it. It is hard, but God is good and provides every day. I haven't starved, on the contrary, I need to shed some pounds. But God is faithful. He is faithful even when we are not or we doubt. We have lived here in this church apartment for 2 years now. It is small. It is a fishbowl. It has been wearing on us and we know we need to move into a house. It is funny. Before, when we were living in our house in Rittman, I was very specific about what our next house/land would be like, but we knew that we had to set aside those desires and chose to follow God and his will for us. I figure that at worse, I will get to homestead in eternity! So as we began to pray for a house, we also began to fight our own disbelief. It would be very hard to pay electric bills and have heat and food for what I make. But we continued to pray and more important than our own prayers (which honestly were probably more full of doubt than they should have been) were the prayer of those in the church.

So you can imagine that when I casually mentioned a house that I had seen in the realty section of the local, free, trade magazine to my dad and he was interested in going to look at it that I was not really expecting the turn of events that were about to happen. When we called about the house, the realtor had told us it was open and to stop by and take a look at it. The house is exactly 4 minutes drive from the church where I minister and live. It is on a road this is not traveled too heavily and with the leaves on the trees just starting to change color we fell in love with the house. It was a rather small ranch but it had a walk in basement with a bathroom downstairs, a fireplace, and a finished room. It was an older house built in 1960. The lady who owned the house had been in a terrible accident that had left her a paraplegic. The land was over 5 acres and had enough frontage that it met the building requirements for a second house. The land had been broken into two lots and the house was a steal for the local market. It was listed at $139,000.00. It had a 40 x 30 garage/outbuilding that was heated and drywalled. Both the house and the barn smelled horribly as they were both used to store dogs. We made an offer that included closing cost and money back for repairs that totaled $148,000.00, because we figured that in a few years we would be able to build a second house on the second lot. We were the highest current bidder, but someone had bid before us and they had lowballed it. The owner's ex-husband was dealing with the sale and had countered well below what we had offered for it. After the ex-husband had heard of our offer he told the first bidder about it. That gentleman, knowing the value of the house and land and the second buildable lot, offered him $150,000.00 in CASH and guaranteed a close within seven days. The ex-husband didn't waste a bit of time to even consider letting us counter offer. We were prepared to go above that offer, but the owner would have had to wait for about 30 days for the financing and closing and inspection. We were dealing with one of the selling realty companies "other" agents that worked for the listing agent and are very certain now that we were used to drive up the cost and finish off the deal. We were very disappointed in this and our hopes which had been suddenly raised were dashed just as suddenly. Not being people to be sidetracked easily, we forged on with our hunt, feeling dejected and let-down. But we didn't have to go far, but that story will have to wait.