so we bought a house...

One of the main reasons we finally sold our rental property in Indiana was for the chance to finally have a house of our own.  Diana and I spent a lot of time talking about what our next step was.  We've now got an opportunity to change our lives in some very big ways.  We talked about moving to a bigger town, maybe up to Grand Rapids, or moving down to the South Bend area.  There were many nights and weeks of going back and fourth about what was next for our lives.  Through it all we realized that we both really love it here in Allegan and don't actually want to leave.  So, that means that we were going to take a big step: buy a house here.  We got in touch with my brother-in-law Tim, he's a real estate agent, and asked him to do his thing for us.   The market right now is really tough, the asking price is just the starting point.  Any of the houses we had looked at earlier ended up going for 5-20 thousand more than their asking price!  We were initially put in a bid for a place downtown Allegan.  We fell in love with the old home and were excited to fix it up.  we put in for ten thousand below asking price, figuring that we would get the ball rolling with the bidding process.  they came back with a counter offer, but after some serious thought, we kind of decided that maybe an old house isn't the way we wanted to go after all.  Those repairs take a lot of money, and we aren't exactly what you would call 'rich'...  We withdrew our offer.  Feeling defeated we took a couple weeks off of searching.  Finally we tried again and found a few we liked.  Tim took us around to check them out but they were all duds.  One Wednesday morning Diana opened the real estate app and spotted one that she really liked.  We talked to Tim and he set up a chance for us to see it that day- it's first day on the market.  We walked in and fell in love!  We immediately put in a bid for more than they were asking, hoping we'd save ourselves the frustration of loosing it to a higher bidder.  Wednesday night Diana was tossing and turning about the offer.  In the morning we talked about it and realized that the higher bid was just more than we could afford so, reluctantly, we asked Tim to change our bid down to the asking price.  He did, and told us that it doesn't mean we are out of the running.  Feeling dejected, we both gave up hope and went about the rest of our week.  

Then Friday afternoon we got a call from Tim- our offer was accepted!  So, we seem to have bought a new house.  Now the fun begins...