New House?

Roger and I have been talking for years about moving up to a bigger home and when it came up again we decided to act instead of talk. We started praying for the Lord to guide us on the decision. We were thinking we would be ready to move in 4-6 months. And recently we started looking at homes just to see what's out there, the costs, the square footage, how much work they would need and the areas we are interested in. We looked this week at existing homes for sale and found a few we were interested in and had lots of potential. Most would need at least $20K to make them livable to our standards and all of them had something we didn't like or were major contentions against them.

We never completely ruled out new homes but this week we decided to check out some of the new subdivisions popping up around here in our price range. And yesterday we went and looked at two subdivisions, one practically in our existing neighborhood and another one almost four miles south of our current house. The first one gave us an idea of what we were in store for, but we weren't completely satisfied. Their standards were below our minimums and would cost us way more to get it at least to our current homes' standards. So we ventured over to the second subdivision and I'd have to say we were blown away. Their standards are our minimums. We wouldn't have to upgrade almost anything to get everything we wanted and more. We loved a particular floor plan and found a lot we liked. The prices, incentives and discounts were great. We ended up staying hours longer than we expected. We drove around the neighborhood several times and before we left and it seemed way more friendly than our current neighborhood. People were out everywhere walking around, socializing with other neighbors and lots of people waved at us when we passed by. We rolled our windows down because it was quite pleasant out and drove around slowly to hear how loud or busy it was on a Saturday night. It was so quiet! It's practically out in the country for Austin (for now, at least).

We talked a lot about it last night when we got home and over dinner. We weighed the pros and cons and there aren't many cons. We did a bunch of research and compared the house to the potential existing homes we found and we just can't beat what we'd get with this new house. This would be a home for us that we could live in for a long, long time. We prayed many more times about it and we're still praying for the Lord to close the door if it's not His will. So we're going today to put down the earnest money to lock in the lot, the prices, etc. And after a design consultation, meeting with a realtor about our house and lender, we won't have to worry about it for six more months which is exactly when we felt like we would be ready to move. We are excited about the process and watching it be built. We are excited about what this bigger home will mean for what God has in store for us next in terms of family, friends, neighbors and how He wants to use us. Please pray for the Lord's will to be done. We'll update you later on what we finally decide to do... Thank you.