a house for my birthday,,,

today i discovered that the best version of "happy birthday" ends with the words "they accepted your offer, happy birthday to you!"

at 5pm, i had given up hope of hearing anything... but kris called at 5:03pm to sing me happy birthday - and ended with those words. i burst into tears (and may have shrieked), and then it took me quite a while to get a hold of myself.

it had been an emotional week. we discovered the house last week, on a house-hunting outing with kris and megan. it was better than the house we'd picked out previously, which we were simply waiting for to come back on the market after foreclosure. but this house... oh, this house. all of the problems the other house posed, which we decided we'd make work or fix - only 720 sq. ft., only 2 bedrooms, no garage, purple carpet, overpowering dog "scent", and purple-painted kitchen cabinets - were answered in this new house. 1025 sq. ft. 3 bedrooms. a perfectly-sized garage. and no purple. not to mention, the nicely-sized bath and ginormous back yard. we knew we were in for a ride, though - the house is bank-owned.

so, we made the offer monday - after seeing it three times, doing a preliminary (and partial) inspection with my dad, and falling deeply in love, only to hear tuesday morning that our offer had been rejected because of our FHA financing and FHA's supposedly stringent appraisal requirements (never mind that we said we'd do any required work).

we thought we'd lost out. my heart was broken, i cried a lot, and generally didn't accomplish much that day. but then our mortgage consultant posed plan B: what if we resubmitted as a conventional loan with a slightly higher interest rate. this program came with other perks as well, so we went for it. wednesday morning, the new offer was in, and we were told to expect a two day wait.

we were optimistic, of course. after all, how cool would it be to "get" a house on my birthday? but by 5pm, we'd given up hope... and now you know the rest of the story.

the best part - we see God's hand in the fact that there was a second offer on the house, comparable to ours, by a co-op of developers who buy good deals and, i assume, rent them out (or flip). and yet, the selling bank picked us.