Well, it's
been a long time since I posted something here, but probably for good
reason. I didn't think I had anything to post and had about given up on
our dream. Thankfully, my husband has strong faith and continuously
reminds me of our dream. Over the past few years we've continued to look
for property and remained active with the Alpaca Farms we've made friends
with. We've been very involved in helping with shearing day and National
Alpaca Days. I've learned a lot of about both along with other Alpaca
information I've been hoarding.
This brings me
to my reason for posting today. We finally found a farm in February of
this year and are now thoroughly ensconced in building our farm life.
There has been so much that has happened over the past six months. It was fluke finding this place. Over the past six years, we continued to
watch for property to be listed either on the web, local paper, or what our
realtor found. The paper has a special section on Sundays for land /
farms / acreages for sale. That's all I usually checked in the
Sunday paper. If there was anything of interest, we'd take a drive and go
check it out. So many times, the location was not ideal, or it was out of
our price range. On this particular Sunday in February, around two in the
afternoon, I found a small three-line ad for an open house that afternoon at
2:30 p.m. I never usually looked at
these ads but for some reason did that day.
The house was within our price range and located in Murray, Nebraska.
I did my usual searches, found the house online, looked at the pictures and
figured out how far it was to Geoff's work. (I work from home so commutes
no longer concern me). It was a nice looking home by the pictures I
found and with the price they had it at, I figured it could already be gone
which had happened so many time to us. So I made a quick call to the realtor to
be sure the open house was still on. I
woke Geoff up from a quick nap and told him to get moving -- we had house to go
see! Now that I think about it, that may
have been the last nap Geoff’s had on a Sunday afternoon!
We headed to
Murray, Nebraska, which was about 25 minutes from our home in Bellevue,
Nebraska. When we arrived, the driveway probably had about ten cars in it
with several people walking all over the property. It was a newer home
(built in 2000), 1 1/2 story home on 3 acres. We looked around and could definitely
see the potential. The home had a beautiful
living room with built in bookcases, dining room, four bedrooms, two baths, and
one a master bath with whirlpool tub. The front porch was a wrap around, there
was an enclosed sun porch and a deck off of the master bedroom with access to
the sun porch. The lawn took up probably half the property, but there was still
approximately 1 1/2 acres available for pasture.
We learned the
home was in foreclosure and held by HUD. Which meant we had to make a bid
on the home and we had one week to get all our ducks in a row to place the
bid. There was a lot happening that week but by Saturday, our realtor,
Lori Caffrey (Nebraska Realty) helped us place our bid. Then
it was time to wait. We wouldn't know until Monday whether we won or
not. During the wait time, I did more research on bidding on HUD
properties and learned that the last two digits of your confirmation number is
where you are in line of the bid process -- we were #6! We kind of
figured there would be a lot of competition and it appears there was. I
also learned that each bid is opened sequentially until a bid meets all their
criteria.
Monday morning
Lori called me about 8:30 a.m. We’d won the bid!!! There was a lot
that happened between winning the bid and finally moving in. We learned a lot about the HUD and what it’s
like to buy a house from them. I spent a
lot of time coordinating utilities, inspection people, plumbers, HVAC people,
etc. because we were so limited by HUD as to what could be done and when. The house was purchased as is. HUD indicated there could be a plumbing
problem but could not provide specifics and the water was turned off. HUD doesn’t allow you have the water turned
on during an inspection, so we prayed a lot until we took possession and could turn
the water on and test all the plumbing. We spent the first three days of owning
the home, just making sure things worked, moving the basics in and doing a lot
of cleaning. Overall the house was in
good shape, it just needed some TLC and we’re working hard to do that.
We finally spent
our first night here on Friday, April 14, 2017.
That's how we got to where we are today -- Murray, Nebraska, me catching
up on my blog and you catching up with me.
We feel very blessed to have won this house. We’ve had some bumps along the way the past
six months, but we believe that God put this house in front of us and is not
giving us more than we can handle. Things
are really starting to happen and I’m excited to share more of our journey with
you.
Welcome to Majesty Farm!
