Our Many Abodes 1/6

I do believe the only type of house we've not lived in is a shoe....it wouldn't surprise me if one was somewhere on our horizon that's for sure....

1996-2004
We lived in fifth wheels while traveling for a living, in fact we'd been married 8+ years before we decided it was time to purchase our first home. What a disaster that was. We were so desperate to have a house, we jumped on the first house we looked at, that was listed at the very lowest price on the MLS in our area.

$215,000 for an 1100 sq ft home built in 1965. But it was ours. We had big plans to remodel it and make it spectacular. Those dreams however, were dashed on the rocks when I got sick.

Our lovely Aerostar van blew up while I was going through chemo, warranting the need to refinance our house to purchase another vehicle. We had no idea what a mess we were getting into.

Our hardly affordable house payment of $1700 jumped up to $2200...my husbands housing allowance of $800 for being youth pastor, while paying the same amount in rent for our branch work in Davis, then his regular job going south, along with my being very ill, pointed us in one direction. Foreclosure. We tried to short sell but it never happened. Que Sera there on Elk Way!

For a short time after that, we evangelized and stayed wherever we were put up.

Four months in a small 2 bd mobile home in Tucson Az....

Summer 2005
The call came to apply for the church in Chowchilla. That took months to come to fruition.

Obviously it did eventually. When it did there was no time to lose. We had to find a house and move in in a week and be ready for our first service the next Sunday. We knew not a soul. We brought one dear friend from Elk Grove to help us.

A neighboring pastor was so kind as to call to inform us we were not to contact friends of ours who attended his church to help us. No need to expound here, it was what it was and how it continued to be during our 5 year stay. Just dripping with brotherly love.

We rented a modest sized (2000 sq ft) home in a nice gated community. It wasn't the exact house I had hoped for-it had white carpet and I had a toddler. That toddler happened to be my only companion as I viewed the home-I spoke with the landlord while she ran around banging closet doors. The landlord was desperate to rent it out. He offered 2 months free rent if I'd take the keys that day. We could not pass that up as we were broke-the church account was in the red upon our arrival. No job to speak of yet, we were strictly riding on faith.

The backyard wasn't landscaped but he promised to have it done before fall. (This was late August)

That never happened. 2 months later he said it was too rainy to do the yard-we must wait till spring. By mid winter we noticed certified letters were arriving and odd photographs randomly being taken of the home. The tell tale signs of a foreclosure and a trial membership to foreclosures dot com confirmed our fears.

So 8 months in we were house hunting again.....