While walking the dogs on a drizzly Saturday afternoon, I had a conversation with a house-shopping couple from Canada who pulled up along side of us. They wondered if this neighborhood ever flooded. (It doesn’t.) They were also surprised at the cost of living here. I thought it was affordable, but with current prices, taxes, interest rates, and the exchange rate, it’s more expensive than it used to be.
As I walked away, I realized how blessed we were to have built our house nearly thirty years ago. I’m not sure we could afford to do it in today’s market.
After my wife and I got married, our first home was a one-bedroom, one-bathroom upstairs apartment on Spy Run in Ft. Wayne, Indiana, which we rented for $200 per month. The kitchen was five-foot by five-foot square, barely big enough for one person to stand. We only lived there for about four months, before packing up and moving to Baltimore for my vicarage (internship).
In Baltimore, the churches sponsoring us put us up in a three-story inner city row home. It was at the end of the row, so it had a little bit of a side yard between us and one of the churches we worked at. It was a run-down, falling-apart, and patched-together affair than probably should have been condemned. Living here for a year taught us we could live anywhere. No matter where in the world we went, from earthquake-shaken Haiti to remote villages in Kenya to single-wide trailers in rural Florida, we would say, “Well, it’s not as bad a Baltimore.”
After a year in the inner city, we moved back to Ft. Wayne for my last year of studies and rented a small house owned by a couple heading out for their internship. By the time previous owners had finished adding on a few rooms, there was a thousand feet of living space. (And it was better than Baltimore.) When the brutal winter weather hit, we discovered that the master bedroom, way in the back, had no ductwork for heat. It was chilly until we bought a kerosene heater.
After graduation from seminary, we moved to my first church in Coventry, Connecticut. There we lived in a parsonage, a two-story, five bedroom, 2-1/2 bath home on four acres next door to the church building. We moved in to the 2,700 square foot home with a bed, a crib, a table with two chairs, and maybe a dresser. We never did furnish the entire house the five years we lived there. I mowed the four acre yard, planted a big garden, split piles of logs for the wood burning stove, and let our two Labrador retrievers run freely.
The thing with living in a parsonage is that you don’t build up equity in the property. We didn’t make and didn’t save much in Connecticut, so when we moved to our second church in Iowa, we needed a lot of help finding a place to live. For the next five years I would be one of several pastors on staff at a well off church in Urbandale, a western suburb of Des Moines. We weren’t able to afford a home in that community, but found a small home in West Des Moines, not far away. The church gifted us with most of the downpayment on a 1,000 square foot, $65,000 house, the first we owned.
Five years later, we got the call to serve the church in Palm Coast, Florida. Our Iowa home sold easily, netting enough profit to buy our next home in the south. Rather than rushing into a purchase, we rented a home for the first six months. With three children, we wanted a four-bedroom home. There were few to choose from, so we decided to build. We never thought we’d be able to build a home. But building lots were going for $8,000, construction costs were $50 per square foot, and taxes were low, so we built a 2,000 square foot Palm Coast home for about $100,000.
In the years to come, we were able to refinance. We got into an adjustable rate mortgage that was tied to the prime interest rate during the years it was at zero percent. Our monthly payment and interest was actually lower than a car payment! Homestead laws meant our taxes barely inched up each year. Housing booms enabled us to refinance and remodel our home without increasing the mortgage payment. This was one of the ways God faithfully provided for us over the past forty years.
Having written that last sentence, we would do just fine if we were to start all over again.
Waite for it... 