This has been the craziest couple of months I've ever experienced! Talk about emotional roller coaster. I must have twice the number of gray hairs on my head than I had before the holidays started.
Where to even begin? We love our house. It's been a great match for us and we've filled it with love and memories these past six years. But the reality is that all this big yard and isolation comes with a cost...and that cost is TIME (although Mike would probably say the cost is GAS). We spend so much time in the car just "getting" to places that we seem to have less time to actually "enjoy" the places we go to. Mike's commute to work really cuts into time with the kids during the week. Even supposedly simple things like running to the store become an entire morning's outing.
The lovely drive through the country to our house has become something I resent. We want something closer to everything we do on a daily basis. So we started shopping around for a new home. Just casually looking, when we had the time. After looking at quite a few, we found one that felt like it could be The One. We both just knew it was right for our family. We saw it right before we were leaving town for Thanksgiving. Not wanting to miss out on this house, I emailed our realtor before we left, telling her that as soon as we get back we want to make a move on this house. Long story short, our realtor said she never got the email. By the time we settled on a time to get together to write up an offer, another family had secured a contingent contract on The One. Talk about wind out of your sails. There was still hope though. The contract on The One was contingent on the sale of the first buyers' home. So if we could sell our home first, we could make an alternate offer on The One and steal it out from under the first buyers.
It was a risky plan. There was a chance that if we sold our home, the first buyers could also sell their home at the same time and stake their claim on The One. Then we would be left with nothing. We would have to scramble to find another home to buy quickly. Or we could rent until we found something else we liked. But we really loved The One so we decided to risk it. We put our house on the market, fixed some things around our house to make it more appealing to buyers, and crossed our fingers.
It looked promising. We had some showings and real interest. I'll skip a lot of the annoying details and just say that our fourth showing resulted in an offer. After a couple of agonizing days of counteroffers, we finally agreed on a deal. We immediately made an offer on The One, all the while believing that the first buyers of The One had no chance of firming up on their offer. We were wrong. The worst case scenario is exactly what happened. We sold our house and we didn't get The One. On top of that, we sold our house for maybe less than we would have wanted to, since we were trying to sell quickly, we couldn't be too picky.
After a couple days of mourning, we started packing and also looking for a new house or apartment to buy or rent. It was pretty depressing. I went looking at houses while Mike was at work but nothing compared to The One. Then one night, Nora was hit with a stomach flu...vomit everywhere every 20 minutes. I had to cancel some home showings so I could stay home with her. I called in reinforcements in the form of Grandma. Thank goodness for Grandma! She helped take care of Nora while I set up more appointments for homes to look at the next day.
I just happened to be sitting at my computer when I got an email for a new listing in an area we had been looking for homes. This new listing looked amazing online. I felt hopeful. I called Mike at work and told him to look at it. He gave the thumbs up. I called our realtor and asked her to get us in there first thing in the morning and to bring the paperwork for us to draw up an offer. That night, the stomach flu hit me next. I felt absolutely wretched, but I was not going to miss out on this house! Grandma drove Carter to school, then we went to this New House. I carried a bucket around with me while we checked it out. We wrote up the offer and by the end of the day, we'd come to an agreement.
Since then, it's been one thing after another. We just haven't been able to breathe a sigh of relief. Carter took his turn with the stomach flu. Thankfully Mike and Grandma escaped the worst of it. The inspection report of the New House showed high radon levels, which needs to be corrected so no one gets lung cancer. The people buying our home, the Schneider's, missed their deadline for loan commitment. They have been a real challenge to work with, and their realtor is part of the problem. Surprisingly they decided to waive all inspections on our house. At first, that was great news because it meant I didn't have to fix that broken door knob or the few other things that needed attention around the house. But then they decided to do a septic inspection without informing us. So on a Saturday morning at 8:00 am, I open the shades in the front living room and find strange cars in our driveway and people walking around in our backyard. We're still in our pajamas. Mike steps outside and asks if he can help them and they say they're here to do the septic inspection. We quickly learn that the Schneider's brought over a family friend to do the "inspection". He has us run the water in some sinks for about 15 minutes. When he sees that no water has surfaced in the yard (which is covered in snow), he says we passed the "inspections". Unsurprisingly, he admits to Mike that he's not even certified to do this "inspection". The Schneider's daughter, who is also there, tells Mike that they waived the building inspection because her carpenter husband did a walk-through of the house during the 2nd showing and thought it looked "fine". I'll also add that the 2nd showing lasted 40 minutes beyond their allowed time to visit my house, and involved four vehicles full of family members who wanted to see the house. I feel sorry for my neighbors.
The number of people involved in this entire transaction is like a giant line of dominoes. If one person is out of alignment, the rest of those behind it won't fall into place. It's incredibly frustrating to have such a big transaction resting in the hands of people you don't even know. Right now, the biggest issue is the time it takes for all the paperwork to be processed. Deadlines are being missed and miscommunication rules the airwaves. I wish we could do this whole thing without dealing with all of the realtors and lenders and other 3rd parties involved. Things are still up in the air right now. Nearly everything we own is packed up in boxes waiting for a move. We don't know when that move will be, but at least it's starting to look likely that we WILL be moving soon.
It seems like a side note to write about it here, but our holidays (aside from this home stuff) were great! The kids loved their gifts at Christmas and marveled over the "evidence" of Santa eating the cookies we left out. Nora loves all of her dollhouses and her "girls". She plays with them everyday. I am realizing now that I could have prevented many sibling arguments if I had just admitted that she would enjoy playing with these types of toys (even if I did not). She plays so well by herself now that she has toys she's really interested in. Carter, of course, loves all of the new trains he got and he can't get enough of watching marbles zoom through the "woop-de-woop" (loop-the-loop) of his Marble Run game.
I finally posted some new photos on Facebook. Sorry they are so late in coming!
New photos can be seen HERE.
