For the past two weeks or so, my husband and I have been contemplating getting a place of our own. For those of my readers who don’t know, we currently live with my parents. We decided that we would really like our own space, and when we realized that we can make it work financially, we started getting excited. We’ve bounced around quite a bit from idea to idea, considering everything from renting an apartment, to buying a condo, to buying a mobile home. Finally, we’ve come up with a plan.

It’s been a complicated process to figure out what we’d like to do for many reasons. First of all, we are going to Spain for my husband’s study abroad in seven months, and we’ll be there for three months. As fun as it sounds, I have to admit that it is pretty darn inconvenient. My babysitting clients will have to replace me, and who knows if I’ll be able to get those jobs back when I return. I’ll have to leave my family and my beloved pets for the longest period of time I’ve ever been away from them. And if we tried to buy a house now, by the time it actually happened we would probably only have four months or less to live there before we’d have to move out and find a renter to cover it for us for the three months that we’re in Spain. Obviously, it’s not the optimal time for us to buy a house at the moment.

Our second issue is that we own a pit bull. My dog Marley, who is one of the most harmless, sweet dogs I’ve ever known, is unfortunately banned in every apartment from here to the moon. Because of that, renting an apartment long-term isn’t an option for us. I love my dog, and I don’t want to live without him.

The third complication that we encountered was the lack of availability in condos for rent, not to mention the outrageously inflated prices. We looked at renting condos as a solution to our “dog problem,” since most condos for rent don’t have the same restrictions that apartment complexes do. But we soon realized that we could actually pay less for a mortgage than we’d be paying for rent! On top of that, I was getting nowhere in my search because of the apparently limited availability of rentals at the moment.

And so, at long last, we settled on the idea of buying. At first, we searched for condos for sale (instead of houses) in an effort to save money. That was when we had to deal with another complication— the issue of the future. Most condos for sale in our price range had one bedroom, and due to the fact that we are planning on having at least one of our kids in any house that we buy right now, it’s going to need at least two. Add that to the lack of connection we felt with any of the condos we saw, and we were at yet another dead end.

That was when we started looking at mobile homes. We were happily surprised to see that many mobile homes in our area are actually quite nice, not to mention cheap and many-bedroomed! We eagerly started searching through the options. After eliminating the “bad” neighborhoods from the search and looking through tons of photos, we had a list of four houses that we were interested in. However, when we started talking to my husband’s parents about the idea, they were concerned by the fact that “space rent” for the mobile homes costs more than the actual mortgage payments would. Cory and I were okay with that, since the mortgage payments would be so low, but his parents pointed out that it might be a better idea to buy a more expensive house and have a higher mortgage payment than to waste so much money on “rent.” And so, we’ve landed (hopefully once and for all) at buying a house.

That, of course, brought us back to the Spain problem. We don’t want to buy a house until after Spain, but we aren’t going for another seven months. It’s an amount of time that seems to be just long enough to be worth moving out, but not long enough to be worth buying a house yet. So, we realized that we have two options. We can either stay at my parents’ house for another seven months, or we can rent an apartment on a six month lease and be temporarily without Marley. We haven’t yet decided which option we are going to opt for, but we are leaning towards the apartment.

Now, you may be wondering why I’ve gone on and on about the complex details of our housing search. Part of it is to illustrate just how complex of a decision this is. Given our income level and our financial position, any decision we make as far as housing turns into a careful and fragile balancing act. This is a common struggle for new, young, married couples, or so I’ve heard. I also wanted to share all of this to make another point; my husband and I have no idea what we’re doing, really.

We don’t have a perfect plan. We didn’t know a few weeks ago that we’d be considering buying a house within the next year, and we don’t know if that plan will change in the months to come. All I know is that I started praying for God to make us a way to get our own place, and shortly after, financial opportunities cropped up for us. And throughout this whole process, we have been careful not to force anything. God has a home picked out for us, and when we find it, everything else will fall into place. It’s that trust in Him that has kept us patiently searching, reworking, and reconsidering all of our options. It’s trust in Him that allows us to be at peace with whatever situation He calls us to be in; whether that means continuing to live with my parents for the next seven months, living without Marley temporarily, or anything else. We know that we are going to be where He wants us to be, and we willfully leave the control over that in His capable hands.

My husband and I are very excited and hopeful about our new plans to buy a house later this year. We have lots of fun visualizing what our lives will be like in a new place, and we honestly are very eager to make our own home together as a family. But overall, the most important things to us are that we do it all on God’s agenda and that we’re together. That’s what a marriage is, after all, isn’t it? Togetherness under God? Well I certainly think so, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.