buying, selling, moving oh my!

buying, selling and moving is definitely on the list of try not to do very often in life...it has been such an exciting but super emotional roller coaster. we decided we wanted to sell our house after having been there 5 years. we moved in may 2010 from our condo/townhome and knew that when we bought it we would only be there for 5-7 years....with rates and the market stable we thought we could get around $290ish (we bought for $237) when i called my realtor she said oh no you're more like $330...what?!!? so that was final we are selling this place. i started to slowly pack up our things that weren't necessary to live with - every night i packed away one box at a time and slowly got it ready to sell. we did minor updates and fixed a few things we've been meaning to fix/redo. finally open house day came - the house was all ready to go and the place looked great. we had a ton of people come through and even a young couple who's realtor said they were going to put in an offer within a day! no way!  then wait - tears...someone loves our house and wants our house. up and down my emotions went from excited to sad to excited to anxious to tears yet again. we listed the house at $349 - overpriced yes but we wanted to put it at what it could go for if we found the right buyer, but also wanted to give plenty of negotiating power. well needless to say we didn't get an offer and we ended up dropping it to $344 for the next weeks open house. no offers. we then lowered it to $339 for the next weekend and low and behold no offer....omg why does no one love our house? once again roller coasterrrrrr!

in the meantime we had looked and searched for our new home. no luck - nothing on the market...house after house - too much or too small or not the area or no yard or closed off etc etc until we had finally found it. country manor! what a beauty of a house. a hot tub, open floor plan, master suite on a level all on it's own 6 beds 5 baths holy cow what a house...well with a price tag of $459,900 it was pretty pricey - we came in at $445 1.5% closing costs...heard back next morning they countered at $456 and would pay our closing. not much of a counter but we accepted anyway. this was a contingent offer based on us selling our house and they were ok with that. 

now back to selling. we kept our price at $339 and decided we'll just wait it out until we get an offer...well with other great houses up for sale in our neighborhood doing open houses the next weekend, my realtor wanted to take advantage of the traffic. so one last open house and apparently that did the trick :) 

brad spence a young 26 year old single guy put in an offer of $325 no closing costs - we countered $329 no clsoing and he accepted based on the fact that we would give him our couch, dining room table, bookshelf/storage and tv entertainment center....well in that none of that was really worth that much we agreed. so the house is SOLD 

when leanna called me i was happy financially but emotionally i was pretty torn up about it. what single guy wants to buy my cutest house ever??! no it should be a young couple!!! well beggars can't be choosers and we can't necissarly choose who buys our house in that it's been 4 weeks and 0 offers...so we accepted it and moved on.

now on to buying country manor! well we got the inspection, we got the bids for remodel and everything was adding up! the carpet was in terrible shape, dog urine in several areas and now we find out we need a new roof! the bill on this house was getting a lot out of control and so we eventually decided to start looking at other options to make sure we REALLY wanted to for sure move on. since the sellers of country manor weren't willing to help with much we went on to look for other houses...

well one day dave saw a house in olympus cove. it wasn't much in pictures but for the stellar price of $395 we had to take a look. our realtor scheduled a showing that night from 4-5 along with 2 other houses. well the next day she called and said that there was an offer already on the house :( BUT the owners hadn't accepted it yet and that if we wanted to see it and or put in an offer we needed it in by 4pm. so since our showing wasn't until that night, we decided to hurry and see it at 11. dave couldn't get off work so just leanna and i went. we really liked it so i text dave and told him i was putting in an offer! dave concurred and so we offered $402 no closing costs. 

leanna scheduled another showing at 4:30 so that dave had a chance to see it - while we were there the selling realtor called and said we got the house! hallelujah! we beat out 3 other offers and we found out the reason we got it was because we were a family whereas everyone else was an investor! 

we scheduled the inspection, contacted the contractor and we were on our way! the inspection came back decent - nothing that was a deal breaker, so we asked for $2800 to help us with the major plumbing and electrical problems. they accepted and now onto closing!

stay tuned for the before and afters!

we moved out of our house on may 22 and it was a pretty emotional day. i cried pretty much all day and was really worn out by days end. we said our goodbyes and now onto a new chapter. i can't wait to see what lies ahead. change is always hard and we loved that house of ours. it is hard to move on but i know things will all work out. 

goodbye 3154 s we will always love you :)