A Place to Call Home!

P8030340, originally uploaded by A Family On A Mission.

We have been searching since we arrived in Cuenca for a place to call our own. We have been living in a temporary furnished apartment which has been great. It is located on a very main street, across from one of the three rivers in the city and a big enough space for the kids to play and not feel too claustrophobic. It's also near a lot of things like a park, great stores, the mall, good restaurants and in walking distance from many things, including Bolo and Jenny's place.
So we have had an idea of where we want to live and have scoured the streets looking for houses for rent. Renting in Cuenca is not at all like Canada. Usually we think about looking in the classifieds or word of mouth from friends or family. Here finding a place to rent is either by word of mouth or by walking along the streets looking for a sign in the house window. There are a few classified ads but not many and very few have been anywhere near the area that we would like to live.
Even a realtor in Cuenca is not common to be able to find a place to rent. Most realtors sell houses and that is all, very few even bother to find places to rent to people. And it has only been in the past few years that realtors have even begun to sell property.
Fortunately on one of our walks, Travis happened upon a realtor company that was called New Life. He wondered if this was just the name as I suppose when you buy a house, you sort of starting a new life. But he happened to come upon four men having a bible study and asked them if they would be willing to help us find a place to live. We wonder if this was a coincidence at all or that God was bringing us to Christian people who would find us a good place to live for a decent price.
So with the help of these realtors, Bolo and Jenny and a few other people, we continued to look. Many places once they found out that we were foreigners wanted to charge us more for rent so we didn't look at a lot of places that we ended up calling. In fact we had so few options we wondered at all if we would find a place anytime soon.
During one of our days with Bolo and Jenny, we headed home walking the streets again and found a little house not far from our apartment for rent. We had Bolo and Jenny call and book a time to see it. I went with Jenny one day to look and was glad to see that it was a little small but maybe something that we could start out in. Unfortunately, once they realized who we were the price went up again and Jenny told us that we could find something better. By that time though we were going into another month at our temporary apartment and my hopes were not high on finding a house. After all we had only seen one house for rent during this whole time.
On August 8th we got a phone call from one of the realtors we had talked to before saying that he had a place that we could see. So we decided to check it out. They had told us approximately where it was located so we went walking all along that area that morning to see if we could find it. We had to wait till the afternoon to be able to actually go to the house. But during our walk we found a new park that is great for the kids so even though we couldn't really see where the house might have been we hoped it was near the park so that we'd have a place to take the kids.
That afternoon we met the realtors and the wife of the owner of the house and took a little tour. It is a three floor house with three bedrooms and four bathrooms. It is located in a gated condo which was great as the kids would be able to play outside without us worrying about cars and strangers. There are two other houses in the condo and four apartments. The top floor is a large open area which is probably what sold us the most besides the closed condo. Though the bottom floor where we would entertain is smaller then we hoped for, the top floor makes up for it.
We thanked the realtor and the wife and decided to think it over for the rest of the day. But after thinking it over we decided that it was great in many ways. One way is that is really is less then a block to that new park we found, it's right in the area we wanted, it's a quiet neighborhood, there is opportunity to meet our neighbors and it's got lots of space for the kids to play. So we called up the guys to say we wanted the place and on August 10th we signed the contract for our new place.
We are excited to be moving to this new place but for now we are still stuck in the temporary apartment, well at least until Saturday. We still have to furnish our place and buy the stove and fridge as those do not come with rentals, unlike Canada. However that has been taking us time to do that as you can always get a much better deal if you pay with cash rather then with cheque or credit card. So we are just waiting on a money transfer from Canada to our bank account here in Cuenca so that we can finally move into our place. Thanks to Carol for helping us get the transfer going, hopefully by the middle of the week we can start buying things like beds, washer,dryer, stove, fridge, table and couch, just to name a few essential things. But we praise God for a new home to be able to start making Cuenca our home away from home.
And by the way, the house in the picture is not our new place, you can see the pictures of our place on our flickr. Thanks for all your prayers on finding a house and please be in prayer that our transfer of funds goes through too.