Les Maison des Lunes: Finding our home

So about 10 years ago, my husband and I moved our family of 3(myself, my husband and our son) from our childhood home of Long Island to upstate New York. We were looking for a quieter and slower pace of life, along with somewhere cheaper to live. And so we packed up and moved to a quaint little New York town that we have fallen in love with.

We did not see it then, but the Lord was the One orchestrating our move, for a purpose much greater than a different change of pace. He placed us in a rental home, where our plan was to live for a year or two and then buy a home.

Shortly after we moved into our short term rental, my husband and I turned our lives over to Jesus. Best decision we have ever made! However, very quickly, the Lord changed many of the plans we had made for ourselves, and showed us the plans He had for us.

"For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways," declares the LORD." Isaiah 55:8

So 8 years and 3 kids later, the Lord finally provided a home for us far beyond anything we could have ever imagined!

Our new home

It was a foreclosure on 11 acres of land, and although the house needed a lot of love and updating, all the major things were recently taken care of - new roof, new septic tank, new furnace, and supporting beams placed in the basement.

The exterior of our 1820's farmhouse had been partially painted in 2005. It was painted halfway because the neighbor who had helped the home owner paint the house fell off the scaffolding and shattered his leg. (He's fine now!) After that, painting was stopped.

When we bought the house, no mortgage company would touch this house with a ten foot pole. So we offered to pay cash if the selling bank would work with us. After some hemming and hawing on their part, they finally agreed to drop the price. The Lord allowed us to get a house that the bank owed $124,000 on and buy it for $70,000. A local bank worked with us the whole way, we took out a personal loan, and after 7 long months of waiting on the Lord, the house He intended for us was finally ours!

Our local bank that we had secured the personal loan through had a must-do list for us to accomplish in order to switch from a personal loan to a home equity loan. I don't know if anyone has done a personal loan before, but the interest is quite high! The personal loan had an interest rate of 14%, where as our home equity loan interest rate is about 3%. That makes a BIG difference in a monthly payment!! Especially when the goal is to pay off the debt in 7 years! (After reading through Leviticus together, we really feel led that this is what the Lord would have us do.)

And so, all other work for the house was put on hold while we worked on the bank's Honey-do list! We had to fix the sill and the soffit, fix the boarded up kitchen windows, and repaint the house. They were very reasonable with their list, and most of it were things that were on our own list as well. It was all outside work that we needed to do, and since it was a week before Christmas when we moved in, we had to sit tight and wait for warm weather to appear!

In the meantime, that gave us a few months to unpack, settle in, and make it as homey as possible!