Homeowners once again

In a few hours we will close on the new (117 year old) house. Mark and the realtor are doing a walk-through at 10:30am to make sure nothing unexpected has changed since we signed the contract. It's been a crazy week. On Tuesday evening (yes, 3 days before closing), the realtor called and said the current owner wanted to know if the tenant could stay an extra month and pay us rent. If we had known about this, say, a few weeks ago, we might have been able to work something out. But we've got inspections next week, and appliances being delivered, and there's just no way.

And this week we became property managers for a friend of Mark who is moving out of state and will be renting his two-family house. Mark's been fielding phone calls about the apartments and showing them--3 times yesterday!--to prospective renters. We think we've got both units rented out, but the leases aren't signed yet so we'll see. We'll be glad to get them rented so all we need to worry about is maintenance.

God is moving in some unexpected ways in our lives with the house and the property management. It will be interesting to see what He's got planned for us. Right now I think we pretty much feel like we're along for the ride. :)

And Wednesday night we got to babysit! We watched Ashley (4 yo) and Maggie (almost 2), Scott and Heather's girls, while they had rehearsal for worship for church. Their usual babysitter was unavailable at the last minute. We met all of them for dinner and then we finished up dinner with the girls and took them back to the base. It's fun knowing them and the girls so well that we know their exact bedtime routine. It was a little more crazy than usual since their whole house was in boxes--we couldn't even find a book to read for bedtime stories! But definitely a lot of fun. We're going to miss them a lot. :) We'll see them at least one more time before they leave as they're coming out to see the house on Sunday (plus we're holding their camcorder hostage to get video footage of the new house ;) ).