The search for a new house

My lovely wife, Ann and I have been looking for a new house to move into. Ann has a couple of really terrible diseases (rheumatoid arthritis and sjogren's syndrome) that make it increasingly difficult for her to climb the stairs the bedroom and bathroom in our current home. Our objective is to find a house in which those rooms are on the same level as the living room and kitchen, and if possible, the laundry room as well. We have other needs in a home too, so we've been trying to find one that also has a "great" room as our current home does, and a yard at least as big as our current yard. The yard thing is because I'd like to have enough land that we can plant enough to live off of if necessary.

Last night, we finally found a home that with a few modifications (like removing some trees and updating flooring etc.) could fit the parameters. We prayed about it and decided to make an offer. We got a call back from Steve, our agent a few minutes later. "They've already had seven offers and some are actually higher than what it's listed at. Two of them are cash offers." We told him we'd call him back in a few minutes. After talking, we raised our offer by $5000. We waited for Steve to call us back. Finally he did. "They are going with one of the cash offers as they want to close quickly and with cash, they can close in about five days." Apparently we had slightly beaten all the offers, but not enough to sway those selling the house to take our offer, which would take a few weeks to get to closing.

This seller's market has been a frustrating experience as many homes that we thought might work have been sold within the first couple of days of listing, many with multiple offers, and before we could go and see them.

Our other option is to convert our garage into a bedroom/bathroom. But there have been some frustrations there as well, as the first two appointments for contractors to bid on the job have fallen through and had to be rescheduled. So frustration mounts, but we need to keep clear head and keep positive. Things will happen.