Open House

We are on the move...well trying to. We need more space. We are busting out of our 1500 sq ft 3 bed house. It's been great for our little family. We love the neighbors, cul-de-sac with playground, the elementary school, the convenient location and have made wonderful friends in our ward, but we knew we needed to eventually move to get more space. We moved in 9 years ago and thought we'd be here for 3-5 years. Ha! Thanks to the housing market for tanking we stayed longer than originally thought. But it's been fine. We have made this house our home and have good memories here. I get all sentimental thinking about it. 

We met with a Realtor a few weeks ago to see our options (if it was even feasible to sell now, with it being still valued lower than what we owe). She came out the next night to see the house and said she had some clients that were actually LDS and that this would be perfect for them. Well, the following Monday that couple came to look at it and loved it. They wanted to make an offer on it. It wasn't even listed yet! We were thinking of listing it in March, but after hearing that someone was interested we went for it. We set an open house date for Feb 1st, but then debated whether to even list it or just let them make an offer. Well, long story short, our Realtor talked to her broker friend who suggested we just list it to get good market exposure (Kyle wanted to do that too). We did and upped our open house to a week earlier. My Mom and Dad had come over to watch Kate play basketball the weekend before our open house and she helped me paint all our doors and door frames so that was perfect. We had that all done and I could do all the other paint touch ups. We got the house ready and listed it on Friday Jan 24th and had our open house on Sat the 25th from 1-4pm. They came on Tuesday before we listed to take pictures and I need that wide lens he used because it makes everything seem so big! 

We had a showing on Friday afternoon so we went to the kids' school playground with a friend during that time. Then Kate had a bball game that night. We got an offer from the people who looked at it on Friday. Saturday morning we had a couple showings in the morning so we left at 9:45am and didn't get back to our house until 4:15pm because the open house was from 1-4pm. So for the entire day we went to the mall, got McDonald's then met up with some friends at the zoo. All the kids fell asleep (Kate is lying down underneath Kyle's coat), they were exhausted, so after the zoo we just kept driving. We still had a couple hours to waste. We drove to Mt. Vernon, turned around and came back. It gave the kids a good nap. When we got back to our house a couple was just walking up the steps to look at the house so we waited in the car. Thank goodness for our DVD player in the car. Then we finally got in our house. We had an hour before we had to leave again for a couple more people to look at the house. Then around 6pm, we babysat a little girl for a couple in our ward for a few hours. We had to make the exchange in the parking lot because people were still in the house looking at it, haha. It was funny. The baby slept the whole entire time so that was a blessing. At 6:15pm we were able to go inside our house and we made dinner and got the kids in bed. It was a long day. There were 10 groups of people that looked at the house today. 

We talked with our Realtor that night about the offer we got on Friday night. We had to answer to the offer by 9pm on Saturday. Basically, it was a good offer. Better than the one the LDS couple was going to make. So we countered the offer, because there were some minor changes needed, and they accepted our counter offer on Sunday! We had an inspection set for Thursday. Today! Crazy how fast it all happened. And good thing we listed it, we got a better offer. Our Realtor did say that a couple other people would have made offers, but they wanted to close sooner than we could. We need time to find a house. This offer we accepted closes on March 7th and allows us to rent back week by week if we need until April 7th, which is so nice. Here we thought our house would take a couple months to sell and it all happened within 24 hrs! Now for the inspection and appraisal to come in fine. eeks! We are nervous about that. We also need to find a house. There was one we've been looking at since November and I had talked to our Realtor about making an offer on it and that night it went pending. I was so sad! Everyone is telling me that something else will come up and it will be fine. I sure hope so! Time is ticking. And can I just say that I'm tired of cleaning and picking up the house spotless for showings, open houses and inspections! ha! The back of our suburban is full of extra toys that we moved out of rooms to make it look less cluttered. Can't wait for my trunk space back. Putting groceries in the car from Costco and Winco was interesting today without space in the back. :)