For the past twelve years, I’ve lived in the community where I teach. Not many people know this, but I student taught in the district where I teach, which is why I was hired. In fact, I was asked to come and teach in this district a year earlier than when I started. Before I left for my year in the Dominican Republic, I received a call asking me to come and teach here. I was committed to honoring my contract, so I declined at that time, and ended up coming back when that same position opened again a year later.
Throughout my first year of teaching at my former school, my parents asked me to find a house to buy. They promised to help me with a down payment, but their main concern was that I was building equity in a property instead of “throwing it away” with rent. I ended up finding and buying a yellow rambler a few blocks away from the school where I taught. A number of my students came over to help me paint the yellow house (now battleship gray), and this has been my home for the past twelve years.
As I think about it, this home has been my home for the longest period of any home I’ve had on this earth. My parents lived in Milwaukee, WI until I was 4; we lived in Fredonia, WI for eight years, and I lived with them in Oconomowoc, WI for six years until I went to college. After college, I’ve been in the St. Paul area most of the time, with the exception of a year spent in the Dominican Republic.
There are a lot of memories in this house, such as group student visits (in those early years), using the equity I had built up in this house for various reasons (new furnace/AC, remodeling the kitchen, helping finance our wedding), and even my first kiss with my to-be bride. Liz’s grandfather helped us build a custom deck, as well as to remodel our kitchen and bathroom. It’s been a good solid house, and we weren’t actively looking for a new home. So much so that we invested $5,000 this past May to put in new windows and a patio door in our house (by the way, they’re working wonderfully, and we’d recommend Window World of St. Paul to everyone). Still, this is a starter home, and I would always call it “my/our crappy little house.” Eventually, it’s going to need a new roof. And siding. And gas fireplace inserts. And a remodeled basement. In addition, we only have a two car garage with a lot of suburban “stuff” (trailer, motorcycle, lawn mowers, etc.), and our driveway faces away from the sun, which means that no matter what, there is always snow and ice on the driveway all winter long, even though the neighbors across the street have perfectly clear driveways just because of the sun. Liz has had her own issues with the house (She’s grateful to have a house to live in, but she has her list, too). When you start to add up what the house is going to need over the years, and you don’t implicitly love the house, it’s okay to move on. But again, we weren’t looking.
I’ll take this moment to say that I have two best friends, and both are named David. One I went to college with, and the other I taught with for twelve years. David the teacher became a principal, and was hired in a community that is close to where we currently live. Nonetheless, David and his wife wanted to move out of this community into a bigger (and better house) and David wanted to live in the community where he is the principal. All that happened last summer, and they found a beautiful house for their family. We stopped by to visit them this past fall, and we toured their new home. They bought the home for an incredibly low price–if they had bought a home in the Twin Cities, it would have been double the cost. So, partially in jest, we asked them if there were any other houses for sale near them. They pointed out a “For Sale” sign across the street. Then my wife and I started looking at the house and started to dream.
We looked through the windows and doors, and liked what we saw, and I knew that a number of my “the next time I buy a house” statements were already answered in this house (driveway facing the sun, three car extended garage with extra height). When we came home that night, I called the realtor, expecting to leave a message, but instead went to view the house. It was listed at that time at $259,000.
We toured the house a few days later, and we saw a basically new, hardly lived-in house that seemed to match all of our desires for a new house, and we began the process of selling our current house and buying that house.
I won’t go into all the details, but it’s been an emotional time for us over the past months for a number of reasons. Keeping a house clean for showings…and then cleaning the house for showings…is difficult in itself when there are three males in a residence and one female (Not that my wife had to do all the cleaning by herself, but when there were weekday showings and I was at school, she did have to do all the cleaning by herself).
This past week, we had a showing (our 15th), and our last. There’s a couple of funny stories that go with it (which I won’t tell at this point), but we settled on selling our house for a price that causes us to bring $5,000 with us to closing, which we’ll recover when we receive a $6500 tax credit for buying a new house at tax time. And the last hope is that we’ll qualify for a Rural FHA loan, which means that we’ll need no down payment to buy our new home in January.
There are still a couple of minor hurdles to jump, but we are in our new home for a very good price (we didn’t even need to make a second offer…the buyer offered us the price we wanted), our current house has to pass inspection, and the sellers of our new house also have a few things they need to take care of.
Throughout this process, we’ve been praying, a lot. Our prayer has been that God would aggressively and clearly shut doors for us if we weren’t supposed to move. But he kept opening doors (the possibility of a Rural FHA loan, low interest rates, lowering the price of the new house, keeping that house on the market, extending the tax credit plan, etc.) while not completely closing them (not finding a buyer for a long time, having to lower the price on our house, having to bring money to closing to get out of this house). Just this past week, we received an “ultimatum” from the seller of the other house, as they needed to sell or rent (they are carrying $289,000 on that house, and not living there). We had talked about offering our house as a rental or Contract-for-Deed property. And then a buyer came and we worked out a deal. So we’re very grateful to God for his timing, and we trust that all the other details will work out. It’s an exciting time for us, as we prepare to move and to enjoy our new house for years and years to come.











