August 8th and 10th

Part One in a series entitled The One Where God Gives Linda Two of Her Biggest Adult Dreams.

Given the title, it’s shocking that this story takes place in 2020.

A prologue, because don’t all good stories have one:

Toward the end of May, the best job I’ve ever had was coming to an end and one of my final days of work was spent helping move all of my church family’s stuff from our temporary home in the elementary school to a storage unit near our future real home. We all went out for lunch when we were done and it was all so bittersweet: the end of an era but also the most people I’d gotten to be around in months(again, 2020). My wise and dear friend Josh who also happens to be a really great realtor asked me what my future plans were. I told him that job-wise I didn’t know, but, I mainly just wanted to pay off my student loans as fast as I could so I could buy a house and get a dog. At the time that plan was still a long way off.

Josh, being a smart but never pushy salesman, texted me a few days later and asked if I’d like to sit down and learn how to buy a house. Just so I could better know when I was ready.

Through some divine accounting error, there was a big surplus left from my support raising when I finished at the #bestplaceintheworldtowork, and then I got a new job two weeks later when I’d expected to be searching for a few months. Suddenly my loans were gone and I had a down payment in my hands. I texted Josh as soon as I made the last payment.

Went to look at House#1 three days later.
Every single house we went into, I could immediately find a list of things I loved about it because that’s simply who I am, but none were quite IT and most had some glaring inadequacy(I had names for each house and can’t remember all of them, but the one my whole family remembers is known as The Dump, and I can STILL tell you everything I liked even though my dad was right that it would have been a terrible purchase).

In mid July, right after my birthday, I made an offer on the sixth house we looked at. Looking back I’m so happy I got beaten to it, because even though it was a great house and I really would have been totally happy in it, it’s nowhere near as perfect as MINE. At the time, I was just so done with the whole business and so mad that I had to keep searching, and had no idea how much better I could find.

Then on August 7th, my boss at the time sent me a Facebook marketplace post of this adorable little house. Not only did it seem perfect, it was at the BOTTOM of my price range. It was 9pm but I still called Josh to call the owner and see if he’d let us check it out. The house wasn’t even on the market yet; the owner just wanted to gauge interest. It was TWENTY-TWENTY. Everyone was interested in any available house¹. At 9:15 Josh called me back and said we could see it at 10am.

We pull up to the house and I’m already in love. I squealed like a child every time I walked into another room. This wasn’t like the other “perfect” house. This one felt like home. It WAS home. I knew it.
Josh advised me that there may be some reason for the low price, one we couldn’t see, but that it would be wise to go ahead and make an offer on the spot before anyone else could. If there was some giant flaw, an inspection would find it and we could back out then.

The husband seemed immediately ready to accept, but the wife was more hesitant. She said the next door neighbor was also thinking about buying it, and she’d given her until the next Friday to make a decision, so it didn’t feel fair to tell me yes before the neighbor had said no.

Praying that this neighbor would change her mind, I let myself start searching for dogs. As soon as I found out this one had been homeless for almost five years, I knew I had to go meet her.

But I couldn’t let myself yet, in case I fell in love with her and then the house fell through. (as if I wasn’t already head over heels after that picture and her story)

Monday, August 10th, three years ago today, Josh called her just to get an idea of where everyone was with their decision. Karen(yes, this woman’s name was literally Karen) insisted that the neighbor was almost definitely going to buy it. I gave Josh a green light to offer her some more money. She still said no.

We technically had a glimmer of hope until Friday, but because it was 2020 and I had gotten really good at giving up hope, I made myself squash my heart back down. I’d just have to find another perfect house for a perfect price, in which walking through the door felt like a hug for my soul, and I had to find it all in a hurry before someone else swooped in and adopted my dog(I was unaware that absolutely no one wanted her. With the big headline of “HOMELESS FIVE YEARS”, I assumed there were lots of good people who would see that and also want to be a hero and scoop her out of her caged life before I had a chance to). I was almost as devastated about missing out on the dog as I was about the house.

The story didn’t end there though. Because there was Friday.

(I don’t want to wait four days to continue the story any more than I wanted to wait four days to know if my dreams were crushed, but rules are rules. Part Two coming up. Go hire Josh to get your own dream house while you wait!)

1. I would later learn he had so many people message him about it that he had to take down the post almost as soon as he put it up; Josh just happened to be the first realtor to contact him, which made us the first and only ones to come see it. I imagine winning the lottery feels a lot like that. ↩︎