Restoration Road

In 2004 I bought my third house.

I purchased it right after my husband died, and since the loan was originally written with him as the borrower, it had to be hurriedly re-written. By today's standards, the loan would not have been approved, but this was in the height of the sketchy lending period that led to a housing market crash shortly after.

Anyway, I struggled to balance being newly widowed with four children (one of them an infant and one 2 years old) and holding down a nursing job at the local hospital to make ends meet. As it happened, I eventually remarried- an act of trust which meant giving up my widow's pension from the Veteran's Administration. By the time it was reinstated after I filed for divorce, I wasn't in a position to keep the house and I negotiated a deed in lieu of foreclosure with the bank.

Please don't think I feel sorry for myself or that I regret that choice. It really was my choice. As the widow of disabled veteran, I was entitled to a VA mortgage to refinance. I chose to take the money the bank was offering to relocate to a townhouse rental, making someone more skilled and reliable responsible for maintaining the roof over our heads and allowing us to focus on healing from some pretty serious trauma.

I reconnected with Ralph in May 2019 and it wasn't long before we were setting goals for a future together, including buying a house. But there was always a part of Ralph that was angry on my behalf and wanted that house restored to me. He would drive through my old neighborhood, looking at that house that had been empty for most of the intervening years, and thinking.

We started actively looking for a home to buy, but hit a few stumbling blocks in the form of IRS delays with amended returns, an insane real estate market and a lack of inventory in our area that had plain jane little ranch houses selling for sixty thousand dollars over asking price in a matter of hours. Both Ralph and I are very practical, down to earth people, and that frenzy was a stupid sideshow we were absolutely not going to be part of.

On a whim (or a nudge from God) I looked up my old house. It was listed as available for rent. We knew from the drive-bys that it wasn't looking very good, but we also knew that we had the ability to bring it back to life, at least as a rental.

We filled out the application online. That alone was an ordeal. For example, it doesn't give you the ability to skip uploading financial paperwork for each person over the age of 18, even if one of them is a college student living in a dorm. After trying for a while to find a way to navigate around that, I finally scribbled "I'm a student" on a piece of paper, scanned it and uploaded it in the financial section for my son. Once everything was uploaded and the package was submitted, I prayed. Not that we would get our way, but that if this was in God's plan for us, that we would know, because everything would just fall into place.

In less than 24 hours, an email arrived telling us that we had been approved and we were about to begin a new adventure. And an adventure it has been.