"Why..."

Ah, the common question - "why don't y'all just buy a new house?" It's simple, yet complicated. First, well, actually trying to put these reasons into numerical order is fruitless, but anyway...first, we have super neighbors (except for the sore guy down the road that we don't actually know). I mean, these are the kind of neighbors you can't get twice! Second, we love our neighborhood. We often find ourselves saying out loud "I love our neighborhood" as we're driving home. The mature trees, people out walking, etc. just make it lovely.
Third, we looked at 65 houses in town before this one (and that doesn't include the ones online or the ones we drove up to but decided weren't for us from the street) - there aren't any other houses for us. God gave us this house! The quick version of His work is this: we looked for months, Brent rented an apartment for us on a Monday, the sign was posted in "our" yard on Tuesday - I saw the listing online at home in Nashville and called Brent while he was parked in front of it - all he could tell me was "this is our house," Brent looked at it and bought it (his was one of three offers that day) on Wednesday, the kids and I drove up to see it (no, there weren't even any pictures of it online) on Thursday, and we accepted an offer on our house in Nashville on Friday (the first offer which happened to be on the last day of our listing).
Finally, the house we are creating is perfect for our family. Any other house we would buy would require at least some redoing, so we might as well have exactly what we want in exactly the place we want to be! So as crazy as this whole project may seem, it's no biggie for us because we started it mentally the first day we saw our home.
love to all!!tara