At the end of my last post one week ago, I said something along the lines of "here's to the next adventure, whatever that might be!" Heaven forbid we wait any longer than a week to find out...
FOREWARNING: This is going to be a long post. If you hate my long posts, long-winded people, or reading in general, I would recommend stopping now. Consider yourself warned! :)
Here's how it all started...
A couple months ago, Jordan came across this spectacular house on Craigslist on 10 acres in Chattaroy. To most people, this would mean absolutely nothing, but Jord and I actually like making mini adventures out of random things like this so we decided to go check it out one Saturday afternoon. We obviously had absolutely NO intention of buying nor are we thinking about moving anytime soon, we just like to look at houses together. Weird, I know.
Anyway, we fell in love with it. Immediately. Who wouldn't? It was a home once listed at $900,000 when it was finished a few years ago. Granted, the house was now completely gutted and the bank was trying to get rid of it at less than 1/3 of the original price. Doable? No. Don't you hate it when the "clearance" price is still way out of reach?! But for some reason we started thinking of ways to try and make it work. To be honest, the house was great, but it wasn't really our style -- we had really fallen in love with the view and the property.
And then we took pictures of it. Big mistake. Note to self: never take pictures of a property that's not feasible for you to have. Hindsight sucks sometimes.
Amazing, right?! While we were busy unrealistically trying to scheme our way into making it work, it sold. It sounds ridiculous and pretty embarrassing to say this now, but I was crushed. Like REALLY crushed. I foolishly thought this was the answer to so many prayers and disagreements Jordan and I had about where we saw our future. It seemed like the perfect middle ground to what we both wanted, and then it caved in under us. Worst of all, I was actually mad at God about it -- how could He dangle this in front of our face, this seemingly perfect solution, and then snatch it away?
Dramatic? A little. Dumb and immature? Yes. But for some reason I felt that strongly about it. And I'm not one to get emotionally attached to something like that. It's altogether out of character for me.
My husband, being the sweet, thoughtful guy he is (and I think a little panicked that his wife was such an emotional freak show) decided we should go look at other properties in the area a couple days later. I was dragging my feet but he promised we could get huckleberry ice cream cones at The Ram on our way, so of course I went. :)
Let me back up a little... The original property we looked at was in a gated community that has 40 ten acre lots in it. I hate saying "gated community" because it sounds so snobby! It's about five minutes east of Riverside High School (20-25 minutes north of Northpointe Shopping Center.) Anyway, each 10 acre parcel can only have one house on it (although you can have a limited number of garages or sheds and a guest house if you want), so you're guaranteed that people can't subdivide it or build more homes on their lot. In other words, you have a lot of space to yourself with very few (if any) neighbors. Oh, I almost forgot to mention, the community is bordered by and has direct access to 400 acres of state land, which means even more space and room to play. :)
To make the rest of the long story short, that was the first of many trips out to "the property." We found the perfect piece of land that was WAY more in our price range and an even better piece of land than the house was on. It has a really flat area for a building site, 360 degree views, a well already built on it, power to the line on the property, septic designs already done, a driveway right to the potential building site, and it just so happens to be the only property that borders the 400 acres of state land on two sides. So in other words, the 400 acres is your backyard!
Here is Jordan and the pups on the state land, which is right above the property we fell in love with...
Trying to learn from our mistakes, we remained more guarded about this property. We let a few weeks go by and we tried to come up with every reason why we shouldn't pursue it. We looked at other comparable properties, but nothing even compared. We made pros and cons lists, but the pros always blew the cons out of the water. We took family up to see it and tried to get as many objective opinions as we could. We researched potential costs of building a house, down to the labor and materials. When push came to shove, we loved it, plain and simple.
But we were kind of back to square one: how were we going to make it work?
Finally we decided to take some action and make a low-ball offer with what we had. Not only did we lower the price by a lot in our offer, but we lowered every other aspect of what the seller wanted (percentage rate, amaturization period, etc.) We didn't want to go any higher than what we felt like would be living beyond our means. In our hearts we knew they wouldn't accept the offer, but I think we just figured it was better to take a step forward and go from there.
And then God stepped in.
THEY ACCEPTED OUR OFFER!
Needless to say, we are thrilled, excited, on cloud nine, and still in total shock. We just found this out on Friday and it still hasn't really sunk in. So without further ado, here are a few pictures of OUR property!
Looking north, you see Eloika Lake...
I took these pictures on a cloudy day, so they really don't do the view any justice! Below is the view looking west towards Riverside area. The light green bush that stands out toward the middle is where we'd eventually want to build our house someday. :)
The view looking south, back towards Spokane (although you can't really see Spokane at all from the property.)
We still have a couple weeks to get everything inspected, so if something doesn't check out right we could still change our minds. But as long as everything looks good, it should close in about a month. So we don't want to say it's 100% sure yet, but we will say about 99%. :)
Just to clear up a few things...
We don't plan on building a house on it any time soon, although that is the ultimate goal. We hope to maybe start building in 3-5 years, but we realize that may or may not be realistic. Obviously we're hoping Jordan gets a job in Spokane. If he doesn't, we would probably sell our house but hang on to the property to eventually come back and build on it then.
At the end of the day, we can chalk this up to a total God thing. Had we not stumbled across the house on Craigslist and had we not been so crushed over it selling, we never would have found or pursued this piece of land. We can actually see our future here and we couldn't feel more at home, at peace, and extremely blessed.
Please pray that all of the inspections and tests pass with flying colors over the next couple weeks. We will definitely keep you all posted once everything officially closes next month and hopefully have better pictures to share, but we were busting at the seams with excitement and just couldn't wait any longer to share the news of our next adventure!
We had so much fun during this shoot -- minus the part where I almost killed us all in a car wreck. ;) Luke and Mel had so many great ideas and were willing to do anything (i.e. lay down on the concrete in a downtown parking lot!) It was a blast!! Happy engagement you two! 
