Adventures In Selling And Buying

It's been a little over four weeks since our for-sale house went officially on the market. Since then, every morning I primped and polished it before I left for the day in case someone wanted to come look at it. The extra work added about 45 minutes to my morning routine, and quickly got old.

We had one open house, which brought in some interested potential buyers, but when none of them followed through with a contract we decided to lower our price a bit. After a second open house the next weekend someone was interested enough to come back for a second look, and a couple of days after that our agent called to say they were submitting a contract!

Unfortunately that contract had some terms Hubby Tony and I didn't care for. We countered, and the people had their agent counter back verbally to our agent. Our agent suggested we ask them to put something in writing. We did, but they declined. However, in the meantime she heard that there was a second family who might be interested.  They were, and over the weekend gave us a contract. It was contingent on the sale of their house, but our agent talked to theirs and said she thought the house would sell quickly. Based on her recommendation we accepted the offer.

I was out of town at a meeting this weekend. The business sessions and speakers were fascinating, but instead of giving them my undivided attention I spent a lot of time peeking at my phone emails and texts for house updates. At Saturday's lunch break I rushed up to my hotel room to sign the acceptance contract so our agent could send it on.

Of course once you sell a house you better figure out a new place to live. Tony and I had a short list of the places we had looked at that were still available for purchase. We emailed back and forth and talked on the phone multiple, coming to a decision about which place we wanted to submit a contract for. Tony took the lead in communicating with our buying agent, and before the meeting finished up at noon I had once again used my computer to sign the necessary documents.

Our contract gave the current owners until 5:00 yesterday to accept or counter our offer. It didn't take quite that long. After a little back and forth they formally accepted our offer, which is contingent on our house's closing.

It's exciting and terrifying to know that after 25 years we will be uprooting ourselves and moving to a new home. I think I'm up to the challenge, though.

Five years ago today: Punnies