Have faith... that is what I feel like I have been living my life by these past 5 months. Have faith ... that I get into law school; have faith... that the house will sell; have faith... that we'll find somewhere to live that we can both be happy; have faith ... that God has a plan for my life and He is not going to let me down. We all know that I got into law school and I am going to Cumberland. The house was a different animal, especially in this economy.
I've been asked so many times about the house selling and the "What if it doesn't?" question. My answer was always, "It's going to sell. God hasn't brought us this far to just stop now". It was hard to keep that faith sometimes and I admit that at times I faltered. After all, the house showed one time in 3 months. I continued to pray that God would bring the right buyer and when there was a showing, I prayed over the buyers and the agents. Last week, God came through just as we knew He would. On Tuesday, we signed a contract on the house and the closing is set for July 15. We had the inspection on Monday and are waiting for the termite inspection to be done and then the list of repairs will be provided. The inspector did not go into detail, but did say that he didn't find anything he wouldn't expect to see in a 6 year old house and it appeared to be some minor repairman type items. It's kind of funny how God works... I kept telling everyone that we were going to be in Birmingham over the weekend and it would be nice to have a contract in place so we knew exactly what we could look at in terms of rent. BOOM! That's exactly what we had. So here we were, contract in place and it was time to find a place in Birmingham.
If you follow this blog, then you know the first time Jeff & I looked at apartments, I had a complete meltdown. But, after putting the numbers on paper we knew that this was the only way - we were going to have to rent an apartment. Jeff is making so many sacrifices so that I can go to law school, the least I could do is put on my big girl panties and live in an apartment. We had four more on the list that we did not look at the first time. I knew that if those 4 didn't pan out, we could go back to the two on the list from the previous visits.
So, I took off last Friday morning and drove to Birmingham by myself (Jeff was flying into Atlanta and would meet me in the afternoon). This was the first time I had made that drive and it was mostly without incident. The most major thing was leaving my cell phone charger at home and being down to one cell. This was easily remedied after a lunch stop at Olive Garden with a side trip to Best Buy. No Olive Garden doesn't sell cell phone chargers, but stick with the story... it's how my brain works, everything has to be in order. I met Jeff off the Liberty Park exit and we zoomed over to the Colonial Grand at Liberty Park. This is a beautiful area just north of Birmingham. As we drove up to the apartments, I began to get excited. It was a great complex, very well maintained and off the beaten path. If you didn't know it was there, you would not find it. Amanda showed us the model unit and told us that there were 2 units available for our time frame, both overlooking the 7 acre lake. We had her hold one for us for 24 hours and continued our search. The next complex, we drove into and right back out of, not bothering to stop. On to the third... I thought this one may have some potential and many of my future classmates are living there. We went into the model unit and what can I say? Jeff and I realized then that we were silver spoon and were going to compare everything to the first one. While the unit was nice, we just didn't feel it. In doing our due diligence, we drove through the parking lot of the fourth unit, once again not bothering to go in. On Saturday morning, we went back to the Colonial Grand at Liberty Park with a rental application in hand and signed the paperwork officially making us residents in July. We're going down on the 8th to sign the lease, paint accent walls and hang window treatments and then the official move in will take place on July 11. We spent about an hour measuring and mentally placing furniture and had an excitment that I don't even think we had when we moved into our current house.
As hard as it's been at times over the past few months, it has all fallen neatly into place. Now the chaos begins of getting thins ready for the moving sale (June 27, if you're interested) and then packing everything up. Going from our home to a 2 bedroom apartment means that we are selling more than we are taking. And actually, that's a pretty freeing thing. Stay tuned, it's about to get FUN!
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