House Hunters

We headed off to Florida on August 30th and planned to stay for one week, making sure that one of the days we were there would be a Sunday so we could check out the church. While we were sitting in the airport waiting for our delayed flight, we applied to go on House Hunters! We immediately got an email back and submitted our application. SPOILER ALERT: The problem with House Hunters is that you have to already own the house you're moving into, you have to wait to move in until after filming, AND they want you for 5 ten-hour days of filming for which they will give you...$1000. We passed.

Now to tell you why the house in Defuniak Springs (see the picture in the last post) had us on a plane. Actually, I'll just post some pictures and videos and you can see how idyllic it is. The first picture is our Air BNB, which is not far from the perfectly circular lake in the middle of the town. The lake is surrounded by Victorian houses and small businesses and THE cutest little library!! At Christmas, they do a boat parade and carriage rides around the lake which is surrounded by lights.

We had a true Florida Man (constantly buzzed and no top teeth and wait till you hear the story) neighbor while staying at this cute little house. He chatted with Dan every time we went for a walk, and one night he said "You wanna see somethin'? You can't tell no one cause I ain't got a license. Wait right here, I'll be back in 15 minutes". What? Where is he going? He comes back out of the house mere minutes later with an ALLIGATOR wiggling by the tail!! The alligator has one bloody eye socket (cause apparently that's where you have to shoot them to kill them but it didn't work this time) and his snout is taped shut. But he is MAD! Florida Man says, "Good thing I went to show y'all! This guy busted outta my deep freezer!" Meanwhile, he throws the gator on the ground and starts telling Dan all about which parts of the gator are good meat - poking the gator in said spots and making it swing around and try to bite! Good thing its mouth is taped. After the live Gator show-and-tell came the biggest gator skull we've ever seen and we've seen a few. But Florida Man knew a lot about the area and shared it all. This was the first person God put in our path to help us with this house hunt. Well, maybe you could say the real estate agents who sold our home in Arizona were the first people to help on this journey, but we racked a lot of helpers along the way!

Below is a quick video of the little town of Defuniak that I took from the car. The last building is the cute library but please excuse the fact that I am not going to spend my time editing it and I'm from the wrong generation to know how to do it right the first time 😁

Interestingly, the house that got us on the plane went under contract the DAY we got to Florida. What? God? Luckily we had several others lined up to see and a great real estate agent (Candace - a random find but also put in our path by God). Some of our houses were in the town over from Defuniak Springs in a larger town called Crestview. It did not have nearly the charm of Defuniak. That's why we wanted to be there on a Sunday, so we could try out both churches. The week we were house hunting, hurricane Idalia had just come through. After getting all ready to go to church in Defuniak, we showed up to an empty parking lot! The sign on the door said church was canceled because everyone was out helping clean up after the hurricane! How are we supposed to gather intelligence if no one is at church?!? Then God put another person in our path. A member of the ward that didn't know church was canceled showed up just as we were leaving. We were able to talk with him extensively and found out a lot of great things about the ward, but also that there are no youth. That was just not good news. Nonetheless, we kept all the houses on the list in both places and started naming them so that we would know which house we were talking about. 

Chicken House

80's Palace

Crazy Old Lady House

Goat House

 

New Kitchen House

 

Piano House

AND THE DREAM HOUSE

You drive down this magical road and you don't know what you're going to find at the end! But when you leave the trees behind, you find...

Of course the Dream House was the only house not in the budget. (Side story: when I was graduating from high school 30 years ago, my mom took me dress shopping. We started at Dillards. We found the dress. But it was $200! Which in 1993 and for a single mom was out of the question. So we kept shopping. We spent hours searching the rest of the mall and finally my mom started saying things like "You can wear it to church." "You could wear it to dances." "Maybe even your college graduation." Back to Dillard's we went and the dress still hangs in the closet - having been worn for all those occasions (not college gradation, that was a different Dillard's dress) and as part of some costumes here and there. Now in our family, we have a saying and it's "Just go to Dillard's." It means that you're wasting your time if you found the dream and you keep looking.)

Well,  we did not heed that hard-learned Dillards lesson and we kept looking. But...

spoiler alert, we chose the Dream House!!!