Nine more months!!!!

Ha ha ... no, not THAT. Over the next seven to nine months, we're going to be building our new house!! We put down earnest money last Sunday after church to build a new house in Irving, and we are both so excited. While we were signing the papers, our salesperson was explaining the whole building process to us and going over some of the details such as all the meetings we'll have to attend. She made the statement, "I can promise that there will be at least one point (and probably more) where you are so frustrated with things that you are going to want to walk away. Sarah, you might even come in here crying," [and I probably will] "but I will be here to take care of things and make them right." I thought she was crazy, but just two days after we signed the papers, I was already getting really frustrated with things.

It turns out that the power company (or maybe the cable company) had placed a slab on the lot next to ours that was going to interfere with our driveway, and they hadn't bothered to tell the salesperson about it. We drove by our lot after we'd signed the papers (probably at least the 10th time we'd driven by it) and said, "Huh?? What is that? That wasn't there before!" Praise God that we have a great salesperson; she is in the process of getting us switched to a different lot so that we can be completely happy with our new place. Unfortunately, it's looking like this glitch is going to prevent us from going to the design gallery to pick out all the fun stuff for the inside of the house since this Friday will be the only time in October that my husband will be home on a weekday. :( It's now looking like November before we can pick anything out, and even when we do get to go, it'll be after I'm up all night on my night float rotation. Sadness! I'm sure it will all work out, and this is just another example of God teaching me to be patient (seeing as impatience remains as one of my biggest shortcomings).

I am SO excited though. I can't wait to start creating my little home instead of living in this apartment. I have been woken up in the middle of the night for the last three nights by my loud upstairs neighbor who has a bladder problem and stomps on his way to the bathroom at least twice per night, and last Saturday night we were, um, exposed to the sounds of our next door neighbors, um, becoming, uh, "well-acquainted" with each other. Ick!

All joking aside, we've been praying about this almost since we moved to Dallas. It seemed at first as though God had closed the door on this option to build our house; in August we'd been told there were no more lots on which to build the house we had selected. There were few places within a decent driving distance to my hospital where we could build a new home, and all the ones we'd been able to find were out of our price range. We had almost resigned ourselves either to buying an older home or to having to live in our apartment for four to six extra months while we waited on our house to be built at this location. At the end of September, we decided to take a little trip back out to this development and looked at some different floor plans. We ended up finding one we liked even better, the house could be built on any of the remaining lots, and it was a little less expensive than the house we'd originally considered. Praise God!!

In seven to nine months, we will get to move into a place of our own, and my sweet husband says we can FINALLY consider getting a dog!! I am so excited and so thankful for this. It's still hard having my sweetie gone all the time, but at least I feel like there is a goal in sight now. God is so faithful and answers prayers even in dark times!