Exciting News for Us!!

I thought I'd write a blog entry and let everyone know about our amazing news!!!

We bought a house! Now I know everyone buys houses every day, and that might not seem like a big deal, but the circumstances surrounding the purchase are amazing and if it were not for good karma and good people, this never would have happened.

DH's aunt has been trying to help us buy a house now for over two years, and due to circumstances that are too long to explain, we were chopped off at the knees every time we found a house we thought we could get due to CMHC saying no, because of a house DH owned with his first wife over 15 years ago. It foreclosed while it was still in his name as they were separating, because she took over the house and was supposed to be buying him out, and didn't.She just let it foreclose and vanished into thin air.

Anyway, to CMHC DH is "high risk".. not sure how long they hold stuff over your head like that but seems like forever at this point! and since CMHC has right of first refusal for mortgage insurance.. all the other ones declined as well. ( What the point is of the others, I'm not really sure anymore!)

Anyway....back to this house.

I've been taking DD7 to a market at a small village close to here every Saturday morning to sell her photography on notecards we've been making and just LOVE this little village. They have a small fair day every year, and it is a very quaint village/hamlet here. It reminds me very much of the place I grew up in Cape Breton, which was also an old milling village ( grain/grist mills)

We've spent a fair bit of this summer fishing out of that mill pond and enjoying BBQ dinners on the sore of the pond, and walking through the village just enjoying the tranquility of the place, saying things like " it would be so nice to live here, too bad there is nothing for sale"

Anyway, at the market, Dh told me to get to know the locals and ask about rentals and properties for sale around because we really need to get out of this house for His health and also for all our sanity.

So I did what I do best... I made friends with everyone, and chatted and talked a bit and discovered that a house that I noticed before in July and only passed by due to it being out of our price range, was no longer "on the market" and was owned by a local winery and that they house the farm hands there in the summer and it sits empty in the winter, and he was interested in selling it because he was building bunk houses on the vineyard due to the price of gas now and didn't want to pay to shuttle them from the village out to the feilds daily anymore after this year. Though the listing had just ended and they were waiting to re-list it, I was told who the real estate agent was, and I was assured that I could probably offer much less and that it would likely be accepted.( small town gossip)

I got the info and called the real estate agent, and made arrangements to go see the house.

I should have said that a week before this DH's Aunt called me with the name of a mortgage broker who thought she'd be able to help and that by now after a year of jumping through their hoops CMHC would not be an obstacle. Had I not known about her as a contact I might have over looked the house completely, but I figured what could it hurt.

We put in an offer, and after a stressfull week of waiting to hear we were declined by CMHC AGAIN! :( I bawled my eyes out!!!!! I didn't know what to do...this house was PERFECT for us and was meant to be and I could SEE us living there and making a life there and the kids growing up there and even see our future grandkids running through the house there.....it was that strong a feeling in me.

Against the advice of DH, who is ever the "realist" ( but I call jaded due to the crappy hand he has been dealt over the years) I wrote the real estate agent an email. Before this happened we agreed to go with him as the agent rather then bring in our previous agent from last year on it, because it was going to be a straight forward purchase and I just got an uneasy feeling when I thought about going with her, and I could feel good vibes from this real estate agent.

So I wrote him a letter after we were declined and told him we had been declined and why, ( though I had warned him from the beginning that it could be a possibility as it was in the past) and I told him how I felt we were right for that home and I JUST knew it was meant to be ours.

I told him how DH got sick, how it has affected our lives, what it means for us daily, and how it plays on the kids and the family emotionally, etc, and told him every way I could see that this house would make DH's quality of living 1000% better. And then I asked him if there was any way he could go and present a vendor take back mortgage to the owner. ( the seller holds a second mortgage we pay for a period of time until we can get a conventional mortgage)

He wrote back and said he wasn't sure if it would fly, but he'd give it his best shot. I told him I'd appreciate him just asking for us.

He wrote back and asked me a bunch of other questions about insurances, afford ability, etc, and I was upfront with him and honest and broke down our finances for him and explained in detail how we as a family of 4 live off of 3000 dollars a month and how we COULD afford this home. He asked for some references and called them and confirmed we've never been late for our rent ever, have always maintained our utilities bills, and even called around the community to a good friend & a past neighbor who ran the advertising department at the newspaper who he dealt with for his real estate ads, and possible future neighbors I had met at the market and DH's Aunt who he knows from the bank ( in a small town every one knows everyone) to see how they felt about us. Everyone apparently gave "raving recommendation of approval" for us to be homeowners and said we deserved it more then anyone they know!!

After all of that, the real estate agent took this info to the Owner, and he apparently felt so moved by our circumstances and our determination to not let it beat us down in life that he offered to do a vendor take back mortgage for us AND knocked almost $20,000 off the price of the house!!!!!!!!!! So we can have this house paid for in 15 to 20 years, not 40 like we would of had to do if we had of done a conventional mortgage!!! I was shocked...it turned out that the real estate agent and the Owner went to school together, and the real estate agent brought it to him, and that made it easier to fly, since the agent thought he should do it. The agent also waived ALL his commissions on the sale as his "gift" to us!!!!!

When the real estate agent called us on our 10th anniversary and told me this I started bawling my eyes out!!!! my neighbor heard me as I was sitting on the front porch on the phone and thought someone had died!!! She asked if everything was ok, and I shred the news with her, and she was extatic for us and we hugged and cried too! Then I ran upstairs where my DH esentially lives in this house due to his inability to use the stairs well, and told him and he started crying in shock, disbeleif and amazement. We hugged for like 15 minutes!!!

As we were getting ready to head out for our Anniversary dinner ( that we really could not afford but were going to do anyway and just be minimal) the agent called us back and said that dinner was on him and go and enjoy. When he had called to tell us the news, he asked if I was busy and I had mentioned the place when I said we were just getting ready to go out for dinner for our anniversary. He called ahead and had it paid for!)

DH is so happy and excited, the kids are excited but as normal kids worried about making new friends and leaving behind old ones though we are only moving 11 klm away.

So, we signed the deal yesterday and it is official, we bought a house... and we move in late November/1st December when the picking is done and the workers vacate the house.

So let me tell you why this house is perfect us and was meant to be.

The house is an old bakery and is over 108 years old - I was a cake decorator in my former life ( before kids that is LOL, and do some decorating on the side for the community) and I worked in a bakery in my early 20's. My mother and my grandmother were bakers/cake decorators.

The bathroom is on the main floor, and has a deep whirl pool bathtub, and DH will be able to start his daily hydrotherapy when we move in!!!!!

The kitchen is HUGE, which I have always loved and wanted!!Being from teh east coast the kitchen is the hub of the home.

We can make the living room into a master bedroom easily for us so DH can live on one floor of the house, and we can make the house easily wheelchair accessible in the most likely event that will one day need to use a wheelchair and or a walker.This house will allow us to live independently until we are either no longer living in our old age, or they need to drag us out of it to a nursing home because we can't take care of ourselves anymore.

The house had three bedrooms upstairs and we can put in a washroom upstairs for the kids and company with relative ease, the kids will have a room each a and a study for homeschooling and crafts etc.

The downstairs has a nice sitting area with a wood stove off the kitchen we can use as the family room since we'll be taking over the living room as our bedroom.

The yard is fully fenced in. So no more anxiety for me with the kids playing outside and me needing to watch their every single move in this crappy neighborhood we are in now. There is a workshop on the property big enough for DH to have a private work shop where he can arrange all his tools so I won't be tripping over them anymore and he can go there and use and when he gets to tired can just leave them where they are, lock it up and go for a nap and then go back to later. It will give him purpose again in life!

The additional area of the workshop was an antique showroom and is nicely laid out to be able to make a photography gallery and studio for all of us and For DD7 who is gaining publicity for her art in the county, and we can sign on to be a part of the art gallery tours in the summer.

We can literally spit on the post office as it is next door to us, the library is right there, and the mill pond DH has been fishing in all summer is right across the road! we can easily put the canoe in the pond without strapping it to the roof and wasting precious energy on going to the water to canoe for a little while.

If ANYTHING was ever meant to be, this was!!!!!

Anyway we are MAJOR excited and feel so blessed by the love and kindness of strangers we have had in our lives, and I wanted to share that with you all, and thank you for your unending moral support