2 years, 2 months and 28 days later

It's been a long (very long) and challenging (very challenging) journey and though it's not over yet I finally see the ending line.

On Saturday we received a phone call from our realtor: we had an offer on our house.

2 years, 2 months and 28 days ago we signed our first listing contract on that house.

We've switched realtors 2 times and tried for sale by owner since then. I hate to say that we'd lost faith, but at this point it was just like one of those things where when the house actually sold it would just be...surreal.

The offer wasn't that great. It wasn't that great at all. They were offering us nearly $5,000 less than our asking price and wanted us to pay $3,000 in their closing costs.

Now, let me express again that we've been paying 2 mortgages for 2 years. We were willing to do just about anything. Even if it meant creating some other source of debt in order to be free from this more long-term financial burden. At least if we had to take out a small personal loan of sorts...we could see when we'd be able to pay that off. So we crunched some numbers. We figured out what our absolute bottom dollar was.However, we're still taking a pretty massive hit on it because we're asking even less for it than what we purchased it for.

Stressful. Very stressful. We made the assumption that the type of people buying our house and that would ask $5,000 less than asking price and for $3,000 in closing costs were the type of people that didn't really have any money. We thought the closing costs part would be more important to them. So...we countered. Our counter was still $1,000 less than our asking price and we agreed to pay all of their closing costs.

At 12:38pm today I received the phone call with the news that THEY HAD ACCEPTED OUR COUNTER OFFER. And just like that...we have a contract on our home.

Now, comes the tedious, stressful, hair-pulling, long process of waiting for them to get the appraisal and the inspections, etc., etc. That house has been vacant for...2 years...2 month...(and well you get the picture). There's no telling what might need to be done to it.

My faith is high now though. The big guy has been excellent to us. It's all been in His timing and though hard to accept we did know that. I just pray and I really do believe that His hand will continue to guide the process. So say a prayer for us! Pray for a quick and smooth process! We've all agreed to close as soon as everything gets done!