A Sale and a Move

After losing our first offer on the house within hours of blogging about it, I came to the conclusion that I had brought it upon myself by broadcasting our good fortune. I’m with Michael Scott: I’m not superstitious, but I am a little stitious.

So I decided the solution for a drama-free house sale is to shut up about it and not blog about every step of the process. It seems to have worked.

Now that everything is 100% finished and closed, I can finally say it without fearing karmic pushback: we sold our house!

We were so discouraged after losing that first offer on the house. I’m sure this is news to no one, but trying to keep a house in tip-top showing condition while living there with two little kids is rough. Darcy was falling apart without normal naps and bed times, and Forrest was reacting weirdly to the idea of people being in his house—he was extremely worried about people taking his stuff, and frustrated that he couldn’t spend much time at home.

We had absurdly high numbers of showings—it was a rare day that we could be home for more than an hour or two at a time—but for all those showings, we sure weren’t getting much action. We’d hear obnoxious feedback we couldn’t do anything about, and I would treat every item of feedback as a barbed personal attack. Our realtor finally just stopped telling me anything and communicated solely with Jeff, who can take feedback at face value and not be insulted by each comment.

Luckily, we got another offer about two weeks after the first fell through. We were happy with their offer, and gladly accepted without countering. We ended up having to pay for some roof repairs (which we expected), and installing a new lock on the back door (which hasn’t worked since we bought the place). We ended up putting about $3000 into these repairs.

Overall, our sale was a relatively smooth process. I stressed nonstop, because that is my default mode, but everything went fine. We got to meet the buyers a few days before we closed--I suppose it shouldn’t matter much to me who buys my house, as long as it sells, but I am really happy to have met them and know that such a nice family will be in ‘our’ house.

We moved out a week ago, and into a townhouse we’ll rent for a year. We haven’t decided yet where exactly we want to be, or whether we want to build or buy, so we’ll spend this next year making up our minds. Moving itself was just as much of a joy as you’d expect.

We’re getting settled into the new place, and I’ll take some pictures of it this week. It’s extremely close to the office, which is great, but the downside to being close to the office is that it’s in a sort of busy area, which I’m  not thrilled about. You win some, you lose some.

I’m so happy to be done with our sale, and excited to see where we end up in a year!