The Great House Misadventure

So I last left you with our bidding war saga. Well, that came and went and we were disappointed for a while, but as so many people told us; everything happens for a reason. Fast foward a few months and we continued to look at houses mostly online and went in one or two, but we weren't overly motivated to move. We eventually decided to go into a home that was just outside of town on five acres. It had been built in the last decade and had plenty of space. It needed nothing (not even paint!), which was a bit of a contrast from the changes we made to our last home to fit our cosmetic style. After touring the home we decided we really liked it but quickly learned it might be out of reach. The deal had to go through the owners' relocation company which wasn't accepting offers with contingencies; meaning they wouldn't take our offer unless our house was already sold. Well, our house wasn't even on the market, so we kind of let that go figuring it wouldn't be there by the time we got our house sold.

After seeing that it was the sale of our house that seemed to be holding us up every time, we threw our hands up and decided just to put our house on the market. We knew we wanted to move to something bigger, we knew we wanted to do it this year and we knew we didn't have a whole lot to lose. We figured if we sold and couldn't find something suitable we would just rent. At least we'd have a sold house and nothing holding us back next time. So we go through a marathon few days of cleaning our place up, fixing some little things and we eventually get it listed. Our agent, who has been fantastic through this whole process and very patient with us to boot, calls another agent to let her know he's listing our property the same night the sign goes in the yard. She schedules a showing for the next morning and BOOM! Offer, accepted, sold. So, we sold our house in 12 hours. I was in complete disbelief. Not to mention, now that other house is still on the market! Should we offer? Will they accept before our house deal is closed? What do we have to lose?

We make an offer on the other house. The owners accept immediately. We're thrilled! But, alas, the relocation company has the last say and says nothing. FOR. A. WEEK! We wait what feels like a year (but like I said it was just one week) and they ask for all kinds of documents on our house, the people who are buying our house and the people who are buying their house. This frustrated us, but we came to realize that it's a whole world full of cover your own rear-end kinds of practices now so we get it. To make a long story short, they eventually accepted our offer. Yay! Happy! Elation! Relief!

That was only the beginning of what would be the most frustrating month or so I've ever experienced. From this point on it was nothing but little setbacks and threats of the deal falling through. If I detailed them all, you'd get bored and stopped reading, but to hit the highlights: our deal almost fell through at one point (not due to anything on our end) so that threatened our new house deal, that was fixed but then the relocation company wanted more things signed, more documents, etc., the new house had a new septic tank put in (due to the old one being pumped out wrong) so that was a plus but the poor current owners had to move out for four days because of no septic, we found radon during an inspection in the basement (not a deal-breaker but one more thing to deal with), we had to install GFI outlets and fix a door at our current house, and the creme-de-le-creme: our closing was delayed by 3 hours due to a random happening on our mortgage company's part. We literally were driving our stuff around town because our other house had closed that morning and we had nowhere else to go.

So, needless to say it was a bumpy ride, but we got there and we now own our dream home. It's just far enough from town to make my husband happy, but just close enough that I'm not annoyed when I have to go to Wal-Mart! Why can't anything just be simple? Well, it's because of the misadventure factor of course! But life is still good.

We really do live under a lucky star, just as my Nana used to tell me.

Home sweet home!