Wherein the Heavens Broke Open and the Angels Began to Sing

I was beginning to think we might be homeless soon.

I thought maybe we were going to go to Hawaii, sip Mai-Tais in our hammocks, tip-toe across the pretty lava fields, eat a little poi and spam by the poolside, breathe in the fresh scent of hibiscus for five days, and then come home and move directly into the nearest Motel 6!

For those not up on the story, our rental house may be going into foreclosure. We have been asked by the landlords to move out, so that they may more vigorously sell the house that we have been diligently showing to prospective buyers once a week for about a month now.

But there has been a dearth of available three bedroom houses or apartments in Noah’s school district and we really didn’t want to leave here or make him go to another school. Our tiny handful of choices were places that were reasonably priced but shabby, or nice and way more than we can afford.

Now, I don’t mind a bit of shabby, but having to drive to the pool, look out over a 40 car parking lot, share walls with neighbors on both sides, having a balcony that Luka can easily squeeze between the bars of, and walk twin toddlers and groceries up 8 steps to my door while living in shabby?

Not so much.

Then there are the places that are lovely. Lovely and too small, lovely and too pricy, lovely and out of the school district, Lovely and too small, too expensive AND our of the school district. I found one such house and told the landlord it was just too small to fit the five of us. The twins would have to share a (literally!) 8x9 foot room! They would be able to crawl from one crib into the other!

Then, he tells me he has a bigger, four bedroom house opening up in three days. And it was in our current neighborhood (which we love!), walking distance away! It was a hundred bucks over the most we were willing to spend, but we decided to take a look at it. He calls that night and says, surprisingly, the other family is gone already; do we want to look tonight?

I could feel the stars begin to align.

So we took a family-walk to this bigger-than-we-currently-have house. We walked into the kitchen and it had LOADS of cupboard space, pull-out pantry shelves, modern sink fixtures, seamless countertops so there is no place for goop to get stuck and be hard to clean… lovely.

The heavens began to open.

The master was downstairs and had TWO closets! There was cushy carpeting everywhere (which should save us hundreds of dollars in emergency room bills for Luka). It had a fourth bedroom allowing us to have a real office. It had two FULL baths, not the 1.5 we have been using.

And get this (if you live in the Midwest, you just won’t get this)… it has a small but serviceable ATTIC!! YES! That is what I said!

An attic!

And, the angels? They pulled out their trumpets and started playing while others sang, “Hallelujah!!!”

There was no competition for this place as it had not yet been advertised. It was so nicely decorated. It was bigger than where we currently lived, not smaller like all the other options.

It had a huge mass of just-about-to-bloom-jasmine growing up over the patio cover for cryin’ out loud!!

So, we did the math. We crunched the numbers. And we decided our comfort and our happiness was worth a little more than our upper limit.

If there had been other options that weren’t “kinda yucky”, that were not with poorly reviewed management companies, that were “okay” and the right price, we would have gone for it. But there were quite literally about 6 available places in this school district that could house our brood, and most were WAY more than we could afford.

So we said, “Yes we can!” (Thanks, Obama!) And we called the landlord and said we would take it. And assuming that the credit check goes through, we will not soon be living at the Motel 6.

Now I can get back to planning that Hawaiian escape!