It was the house that was totally out of our league.

When I first saw the pictures on the real estate website, I lingered over them, especially the wrap-around front porch and the yard that rivaled any respectable soccer field. It was literally the picture perfect house on a hill with much more than we had hoped for.

I never thought we would make an offer on that house.

There were plenty of downsides to the house.

Some of the rooms had awkwardly placed doors. Only 3 bedrooms (for our family of 6!). Way over our budget. Still, I kept the house on my list and continued to get updates from Realtor.com.

Every now and then I’d indulge myself and look through the photos and imagine what it would be like to live there. Still, we continued to search for a home to make an offer on.

We toured a few houses, but nothing really met our wishlist. My husband and I were getting frustrated in our search. We hadn’t realized it would be so difficult to find a house that we wanted to buy.

Our reasons for wanting to move were simple.

Although we loved our current house, it was on a busy street and our kids could only play in the postage stamp backyard. The front yard was off limits without adult supervision and bike-riding and such was very limited.

I am a big proponent of physical activity for kids (especially my active boys) and so this made it difficult – I couldn’t just turn them loose outside and let them play for hours like they wanted to.

[Tweet “We felt the Lord would make it clear to us whether we should move.”]

You might think we were foolish to want to move just so our kids can have more room to play outside, but my husband and I felt it was so important for the health of our family and we’d always wanted more land. We felt the Lord would make it clear to us whether we should move or stay put.

As the weeks passed, I forgot about the house on the hill.

Then one day, I got an email alert – the price had dropped significantly! We strive to live within our means and now it was attainable! I held my breath as I sent my husband the link, hoping he, too, would find it as appealing as I did.

He wasn’t convinced. Why in the world would we move from 4 bedrooms to 3? And some of those wall colors were a little hard on the eyes.

Still, he agreed to take a look at the house.

Driving up the road for the first time, I had the same feeling – this house is way out of our league. It was perched on top of a hill with a beautiful view. It was gorgeous. I loved every bit of it.

My husband admitted it was amazing. I insisted we could make the 3 bedrooms work. We took pictures and videos and went home to think it over.

We decided to put our own house on the market.

If we could get an offer on our current home, we’d make one on the house on the hill. We’d already spent a lot of time preparing our house and working with a realtor. So it took just a couple short weeks to finish preparations. But our house never made it to listing.

Instead, we got an offer even before the house was on the MLS service.

Crazy, huh? We scrambled like mad, made an offer on the house on the hill, and took a deep sigh of relief. My husband and I kept commenting on our amazingly good fortune. Clearly, it was meant to be. We expected to be moving in just under 3 months.

But this was only the beginning of the moving saga.

Little did we know that 5 months later we will still be wondering if the move would take place.

Come back next week for part 2 of the story, (aka, A Lesson in Patience). (Hint, make sure you’re subscribed so you don’t miss it!) Update: Part 2 of this story is now available!

P.S. Why no pictures of the front of the house? This is just one of those things I don’t share online.