G
gardenswithkids
Guest
God bless you in your home search as well!My husband and I recently began the first steps to buying a house. We’ve found a mortgage lender, a realtor, and now we are going through the preapproval process (ugh…the gathering of all the paperwork is a real pain). We start looking at houses in about a week and a half, and we are nervous, yet excited.
The hardest thing for us has been the decision to actually stay in our town. We live a very large metropolitan area with a high cost of living, so in order to afford a home for our future family (4 bedrooms, large yard, etc), we moved a while ago to a town about an hour and a half commute from our jobs. We LOVE our town, and we have an incredible parish that is very large and active. We love all sorts of things about where we live now, but the commute is really killing us, and it was the sticking point that prevented us from buying in the past. We contemplated moving to another region of the country or back to my home town 5 states away, but that required quitting our jobs and picking up everything and leaving this great town. We really didn’t want to do that, but gee, we were stuck in this “do we move, do we not move?” dilemma for quite some time.
Through prayer to St. Monica and St. Joseph, however, we have decided to stay. My parish started a novena to St. Joseph a couple months ago, so I thought I would join in and ask him for help with our predicament. While my husband was applying to jobs outside this area, and we were thinking that it would be best to move away, my husband got a call out of the blue from an employer in the city. He had not contacted them; they had just found his resume online and thought he would be a good fit. They offered him a job on the spot, without an interview, and then offered him a salary that is 50 percent more than he is making now. Such an increase in salary will better enable us to buy a bigger house for more children, enable me to stay home with kids longer, and make our lives so much easier in general. We took this as a sign and an answer to my novena!
St. Monica has also been a huge help. I prayed a novena to her in the hopes that she would help me in deciding what to do about my job and how we can start a family in the future with me working so far from home. It occurred to me while praying one day to search for jobs that are closer to our town and out of the city. I am also hoping to work from home once we have children (I’m a writer, so it should be a possibility).
Prayer has given us tremendous peace in making our decision, and now we are gearing up for the long process of actually finding a house that is perfect for us. St. Joseph and St. Monica are going to have a lot to listen to from us in this process!
Good luck in your process! Ask St. Joseph and St. Monica for their aide
Yes, lol to what you wrote that I highlighted in blue! We’re looking at different towns. Then last night, my husband shared something he heard our state government is talking about doing
, and next this, we’re discussing and wondering if we even really want to stay in this state! 
Praying about it is good adivice.
I want to go to Mass at the parishes in the towns where we are looking and do some of my praying about this matter there.
npatrol: We’re still out there hunting.
)
. The problem is that we only know so far what we would want and what we need, and sometimes that doesn’t go hand-in-hand with what kids need. For example, we’d love to buy a house downtown (where we live right now), but the traffic, small yards, and poor schools isn’t good for kids. It’s also a good deal more expensive to live downtown.
Great analogy! I knew it was the right dress when it had the quality and style and fit I wanted at significantly below the market value on the clearance rack. And here I am, years later, looking at houses in foreclosure, trying to find a bargain that looks nice and fits!