The new house conundrum, Part 1

So we were praying that God would help us find a place before we were thrown out in the street.  I'm glad to tell you that He did.  But there were a lot of ups and downs in the process.

If there was anything we wanted, it was two-fold:
1.  A decent house
2.  A decent neighborhood

As has been made plenty clear in previous posts, I am unemployed.  That puts most rental houses managed by a big rental corporation out of our reach, due to their income requirements.  Coupled with this, unemployment has--let's just say--limited our budget a little.  Housing in the Puyallup/Sumner area is rather expensive, so we were having a hard time finding anything.  When we did find something it looked kinda like this.

Are you kidding me?

Out of 20 properties we found near the area where we live, we found ONE that was decent. Not that we were trying to be picky, but it just wasn't working out.  The place we found more than 70 houses was Tacoma (20 minutes west and 3rd-largest city in Washington, for my out-of-state readers).  So we started doing a lot of drive-bys, which I hear are pretty common in Tacoma.

In Tacoma, we had the other problem.  Awesome house; regrettable neighborhood.  And did we really want to move to Tacoma, anyhow?  We prayed about it and felt like it may be a good thing.  The ministry work we do is not really church building centered, so the only long drive would be to the big Sunday celebration service.

But even still, a lot of our ministry is home-centered.  But since ministry and home really should be wherever God's people are, we decided to go with it.

The first place we decided to apply for was in the North Slope area (quiet area in our price range) of Tacoma, but already had an application pending when we called about it.  It was too bad, 'cause we really liked it when we looked at it.  Guess other people did, too.  So we applied for our second-favorite house with mixed feelings because, well, it was our second-favorite.  But we really weren't in the position to be picky and really, isn't it just a house.  But we had reservations and told the landlord that we would still be looking while the application was in process.

2nd choice

Over the next few days, we kept looking and on Sunday we got to take a look at a fabulous house near the University of Puget Sound.  It was everything we thought we wanted with a bright interior and immaculate hardwoods and molding.  It was a little out of our price range, so we asked if we could have it for a little less.  The owner agreed and after seeing our credit report and bank statements, felt comfortable renting to us.  We were elated and told her that we need to be assured that she would work with us because we needed to cancel our application process with the other house as soon as possible.  She assured us that everything was OK.

Wasn't meant to be

We called the guy at the other house to cancel.  And began preparations to move into the new place.  An hour and a half later, the landlord from our "dream house" called and told us she had other plans for the house, effectively leaving us with no options.

A week of work, hope, elation and now crushing disappointment ended without any possibilities. And we had two weeks to be out of our house.

The next day, we hit the road early, checking the internet for new houses being posted in the North Slope area as we were driving.  We ended up on the far side of Tacoma looking at random houses when we got hungry.  So we stopped for lunch and by the time we left the restaurant a house had been posted back on the north side of town, so we drove back to North Slope.

To be continued...