And then...the wall fell

The last time that I updated you on our home sale was several months ago back when we first put our house on the market. You can view that post here.

As you may know by now, we sold our home much quicker than expected thanks to our amazing relator (Amanda Abernathy Stokes), and we were under contract in a little over a week. Since we sold so quickly, we didn't know that we would build right away or not. We decided to look and see what was on the market and then decide from there. I spent a few weeks looking at houses with both kids in tow while Marcus was at work, and I found one that I fell in love with.

It was an older house and not at all what I thought we were looking for. But once I walked in, it felt like home. We put in an offer and went back and forth several times. Over the course of a crazy stressful week, we put in our final offer and expected that the seller would decline and we would walk away. To our delight, she accepted our offer and we got a phenomenal deal.

We had our current home inspected, the new home inspected, all paperwork begun and everything else that needed to be done. Less than one week away from our closing date, we came home to this:

You can't tell much from the picture, so let me clarify. Basically, the retaining wall the ran the entire length of our lot had fallen over due to a heavy amount of rain in a short period. We had only put this wall in about 5 years ago and had spent a significant amount of money on it.

Once we stopped freaking out, I had to call our realtor to fill her in. As you can imagine, she was shocked as well. She had never had anything this big happen to one of her homes so close to a closing date. She told us to decide what we were going to do and then we would let our buyers know the plan.

We talked to a lot of lawncare companies, spent some serious time praying, checking our financial situation, talking with our families and then praying some more. We found a company that we trusted and decided to just bite the bullet and pay to have it fixed. Fixed Correctly. Apparently, when we spent all those thousands of dollars five years ago it was not done correctly. It cost us almost twice what it cost to fix it this second time, but we wanted it to be done right for the new buyers.

The company came out and began working. Here are some pictures of their progress.

view out our kitchen window

view from our master bedroom window

Our relator let the buyers know what had happened and they wanted to come by and see things for themselves. Luckily, I was not home or I would have probably have been having a panic attack by that point :)  . Everything we owned was already packed into boxes that were stacked in our garage and in a uhaul and I could not IMAGINE our home sale falling through at this point. Not to mention all the money that we would have lost if we weren't able to buy our new house that had already been spent on earnest money as well as various assessments and inspections.

The buyers tentatively seemed okay as long as we correctly repaired the wall, but we were still nervous that they may back out. Our final walk through was on the day before closing and we still didn't know what the buyers would do. We had the landscaping company owner come out to meet with the buyers and to answer any questions. As tentative as they were, they agreed that as long as if was fixed correctly, they would still purchase the home.

Whew!! Talk about stress! We were SO thankful that although this terrible situation had come up so close to closing, that it had happened while we were still there and could pay to have it fixed the right way. We would have felt terrible if it had fallen for the new owners.

God is so faithful. We were completely stressed about the strain this would put on our savings account, but God provided. We learned a lesson in trust though this experience and also in choosing to praise Him even in situations that aren't the easiest.

I'll update again in a few days on our week of moving and settling into the new house.

Love y'all!