House Hunt

For those of you who don't know, JP and I are on the house hunt again. We have been renting our current place for a year now, and our lease is up in December. We have loved living here; it is an amazing place. We are spoiled to the space we have here, and I personally have fallen in love with living in a two-story house. But at the same time, we really do not like renting. It's part of our nature to want to fix things up and improve things, but since we don't own this place, it's not worth our investment of time or money. It's very frustrating for a handyman!
One day when JP was listening to talk radio, he heard some real estate guys talking about a program through the USDA that helps people buy homes in rural areas. It sounded right up our alley, so JP called in and got some more information.
Long story short, we qualified for the program and have been approved for a loan. We are now on a USDA-appointed timeline to find a home and get an offer approved. We've been looking at houses for the past couple of weeks, and they are all starting to blur together in my head.
The only downside to this program is that they are fairly picky about the house you get. They come and inspect it themselves to make sure it is up to their standards. We would be happy getting a fixer-upper, but they don't really want us to do that for some reason.
Another downside is that because they only give us a certain amount of time to find a house, we have to exclude the short sales and foreclosures in our searches. The banks simply take too long to respond to offers. It could be months before they even look at your offer!
Anyhow, we'd appreciate your prayers as we move forward with this house hunt. We know God will lead us to the right house at the right time. It will definitely be good to own again!