Looking for a House

So, most of you know, but for those who don't, we are looking for a house.  What a difference a bad economy makes.  When we bought out last house, almost ten years ago, we bought from a builder, picked everything out and waited for the house we lived in to sell and for our new house to be done.  Easy peasy.  Okay, getting a house ready to show with a five year old, a two year old and two one years olds was not good.  I hated it.  I remember hearing people walking up the sidewalk and I found Grant making spit-wads (for lack of a better word) out of toilet paper and the water in the toilet and throwing them into the shower to watch them stick.  Seriously, these are the things that throw momma over the edge.  Perfect house, just going to scoop up the kids to leave and spit-wads of epic proportions all over the hall shower.  I just closed the shower curtain and left.  Whatever, they didn't buy the house anyways and I am sure it was not due to spit-wads.  

So now, we are not even looking at houses that people live in.  At the present time, even the builder homes are bank owned.  Some of those are not even finished.  The reason for this is, we are going to make an offer so low,  I would be too embarrassed to actually put one in on a house that is currently owned.  We are looking at short-sales and foreclosed homes.  These are not hard to find here in the Detroit area.  We are in a very nice suburb north of Detroit, and we have looked at five houses or more every weekend for the last three weekends and have seen the same house twice.  There is so much out there.  Some have been destroyed.  We looked at one with no floor coverings, kitchen cabinets ripped out, not a light switch left, no doors on the inside of the house.  We looked at one where the furnace was missing.  Most are in pretty good shape, just cosmetic stuff that needs to be done.  

So off we go into the home buying mode.  It is funny what you will say when you are in the middle of an empty home, freezing to death.  I am doing so much research.  You can go on the city's website and see what the bank bought it back for and when.  I look up the taxes and so forth.  I get as much information as I can and then we go look.  I take a notebook....what did we like, what's wrong with it, what work needs to be done.  All that jazz.  Do we want to move the kids out of their current schools?  What to do, what to do, what to do.  Onward into the abyss.

Is anyone else out there moving?  Trying to sell their home?  Looking at houses?  Let me know, share your knowledge.  It is a chaotic time, but through it all, we are praying that God leads us to the house He wants us in and the neighborhood He needs us to be in.  If God is in it, who can be against it?

God bless you and yours.