Friday, January 17, 2014

Selling, Buying and Crying

The art of selling a house, as we have learned over the last 12 month months, is just that; an art form.

We have a smaller home of 3 bedrooms, 1 bathroom, updated eat-in kitchen, 1 car garage and full basement home with all original hardwood floors. It is not a large home but it has served its duties of raising 2 small boys up to this point. When we moved into this house, we only had 1 child and he was just 18 months old. Four months later we found out child #2 was on the way and 1161 sq. foot never seemed so small. Nevertheless, we have lived in and loved on this house for almost 5 years,

So last January when we decided to list our house 'For Sale', we never imagined what it was going to entail.
-Last minute scrambles to clean-up so they could show the house
-24 hour clean-ups so they could show the house
-A few, we're out of town and I hope it looks ok, clean-ups so they could show the house
See a trend yet....
And so did we, for about 30 house showings. In our small town, that's a LOT of showings for one property. We were happy it was popular....but SELL it already!

(We had a couple of offers, but they were ridiculous and no I am NOT paying to remodel the house for YOU!!)

Then, the Wednesday before Christmas, the house was shown again. I had no hopes due to the fact we only had 4 weeks left of our listing contract and we were about to just un-list it for awhile and try again later. The cute young couple and their adorable baby boy toured the house, asked a few questions, analyzed the yard for quite awhile and then went of their merry way.

The next day, we got an offer. An incredible offer. We countered back and within an hour, we were under contract.
YIKES!
We had stopped the house search in early Fall and hadn't really expected much to happen. We wrote in an extended closing to allow for us to find a house....and that's where the crying comes in.

My criteria:
Decent sized, working kitchen
Larger home
2 bathrooms (mommy is tired of 1 bathroom and 3 boys in her house)
3+ bedrooms
Fenced-in yard
Laundry room
J wants a coat closet and carpet (I love my hardwoods so we will compromise probably)

We have a very limited house buying budget, but I did not expect it to be impossible. But apparently; it is. We have looked at close to 20 homes and only a few met our guidelines. Most of those were over budget. Then, one day, we found it. It needed a small amount of love in the kitchen, but it was a project and I saw it as a good chance to design my dream kitchen at some point in the future. We will call this: The Yellow Kitchen House.

Now to back up a few months, we looked at a house in May that we loved and could've been our forever house, had it NOT been $60,000 over budget. It needed a lot of work. But we could've over time if we could get it for the right price. We call it: The Unicorn & Rainbow house.
(Explanation: The 3rd bedroom of this house had blue wallpaper with Glow-in-the-dark constellations on it and this really bright Unicorn & Rainbow border. I will have to post a picture of it someday. My friend, Aunt B, made up a song about it and would sing it to me every time I got discouraged about our house hunt.)

Back to last week:
We put in an offer on the yellow kitchen house and we got countered, but accepted the terms. Then it was inspection time...not as pretty as the 70's yellow tiled kitchen. We walked away thinking it was not going to happen.
The same time as we decided it wasn't worth it, the unicorn house came back on the market. It was in our price range (got foreclosed on) and we decided it was worth a shot to get our forever house. It wasn't! The inspections on it were even worse and it was going to be a money pit! So again, we walked away.

Finally, we decided that the yellow kitchen house is where we were truly meant to be. So we addressed the inspection issues found: and now we wait....and wait...and we are still waiting as of this morning to see if they are going to fix the problems.

I have shed a LOT of tears and said many prayers over the adventure....and I will continue to pray Gods will for us in this situation. But is hard; knowing that in 36 short days...we are homeless.

Until we know for sure,
MommyShelle