In the middle of the move
That last entry was not the time our house sold. We spent several more lunches and afternoons at the Pour House watching people via the Dog Cam in our house. Our house took longer to sell than we thought – about a month. But it did sell, so far. This is a miserable process, and we want to remember our thoughts and what was going on. Hopefully, things will be great soon so the frustration will melt away. The good news is that Mike, I and Iris are fine and doing this together as a family.
First, it took slightly longer to sell than we thought. So many people told us our house would sell quickly and the market has been hot in our neighborhood for several years, that we may have had unreasonable expectations. A month doesn’t sound long, but it felt super long to us, and we were done keeping the house perfectly clean. It might have also affected our relationship with Wendy and Tom – I hope not but things got awkward. We ended up moving our stuff out of their garage and not renting their house from them. At the end of the day, we might actually save money by renting a house from strangers, but I hope we don’t loose friends over it.
Second, the timing of everything could not have been worse. When our house went under contract, the buyer wanted a short close, which we were fine with. Unfortunately, Darin went on vacation so Iris was home for an entire week -the week the buyer wanted to do the radon testing and appraisal – the same week of Viewpoint’s User Conference so Mike was unavailable – the same week Deanna (our agent) went on vacation out of the country. The only saving grace was that I was able to take time to come home and cover the “house things” but work is (always) particularly busy for me. Plus, we still had not found a place to live but had to move within 2 weeks, and I’m still struggling with the disc herniation and had multiple appointments with doctors, etc. (Please have this back issue be history by the time I read this blog entry again.) Then, the buyer wanted to return to take measurements of the house. Negotiations did not go well, so this “ask” was not taken well especially since it corresponded with the above-mentioned “week from hell.” We are really uncomfortable with the buyer coming back in the middle of our packing. We feel like we had to agree, though we didn’t want to, and it is happening tomorrow so we’ll see what happens.
Anyway, not the best experience. The good news is that we have a place to rent, but have not yet signed the rental contract, and plan to move next Saturday. The rental house is super close to Darin’s so it’ll be a long walk to take Iris to doggy daycare. Plus, we can park the Casita there without having to pay more, and there’s sufficient storage that we won’t need to rent other storage. The entire cost is just a little over our rental goal but under our entire housing/Casita/storage rental budget. The house is dated, appliances are old, we’ll miss our fabulous shower, but it has a great front window for Iris and we should be fine there for a year.
Mike sold the desk this afternoon on the neighborhood app. Yeah – one less heavy thing to move next weekend. We made the decision to move ourselves again instead of paying a moving company; perhaps we’ll regret this decision. We’re renting a U-Haul truck for 24 hours next Saturday, so it’ll be intense. But now we don’t have to move the desk. We’ve tried to pack most everything we could this weekend. We don’t officially have to be out of the house until Wednesday, October 31. It’s starting to feel very, very real, and we’re both reminiscing about the wonderful 10 years here. We really like this house but moving to Redmond will be a great move for us, and we just need to keep our eye on the prize. We texted our contractor this weekend to give him a status and got a quick response. We have a very good feeling about him and about the move.
