Well, it finally happened...we sold the other house! For those of you who haven't been reading my blog for the last 3 years here is a condensed version of the story...
My husband took a job over an hour away. We decided we'd move a little further North to cut down on his drive time. This was the spring of 2007. We put our house on the market and began looking...and looking...and looking. We found many we liked, but our house never sold. We weren't very happy with our realtor, and had told him we'd want to take the house off the market when we started back to school. He said that would be fine, but when it came time to do it his broker wouldn't let us. Long story short, we humored them by going with another realtor in the office. She wasn't very good either so they finally let us out of the contract.
We didn't know what to do next so we made it for sale by owner for a few months. Then, we found good realtors and relisted it. That's when the bottom totally fell out of the economy. No one could get a loan. We hardly had any showings. So we decided to take it off the market for a while (our school year). During that time we had a lot of time to think. We did not like our neighbors. I could do a whole other post on how awful they were! We just really wanted to move and were tired of living in limbo. So we decided we'd buy when we found what we wanted and then put our house back on the market. This was spring of this year.
One of our friends asked me one day how many homes we had seen since we first started looking. I didn't know exactly, but I had saved all of the description papers from every house we saw. I counted them today. I tried to take out any duplicates. We saw some houses twice, couldn't get into some, etc. But I think the papers I have are a very close representation. Want to guess how many we saw?? Here's a picture of them all.
What was your guess? I counted 101! That's a lot of houses! Our realtor was joking with us after the closing yesterday. She said we should just get together every so often on a Sunday and go look at houses together! We spent many weekends doing that with her over the last 3 years!
Ok...so back to my story. This really is a very condensed version! I know you probably aren't thinking that right now!
We found a house we wanted. Made an offer. It was a short sale so the seller's lender decided to foreclose on them even though we wanted to buy it. So we lost that one. But it was in an area we hadn't looked at before and I fell in love with it. Its not as far north as we wanted, but it cut some time off Chris' drive and the neighborhood was fantastic! (No psycho neighbors!) So, we started looking in that area more. Found another house. Made an offer. Got it. Put our old house on the market. Moved into the new one (August 2010), and still the old one didn't sell. Until yesterday! We are so relieved and happy! We sold it for less than we paid for it 8 years ago, but with this market we decided we were fine with just kind of breaking even.
Don't get me wrong, I loved my old house. We had just outgrown it and could not take living next to inconsiderate, psycho neighbors anymore!
So, thank you to my old house for being a good house for us for 8 years!
And thanks to you, the reader, who made it through this whole long story!
There was wax all over his cheesecake! I even found some on the table this morning!
I've been baking lots of cookies! Here's are the ones I actually took pictures of. I've got more to bake today. I haven't been eating all these though. I've given most of them away.
Mint Kiss cookies
Christmas Twirls
And, if you notice, there is even a real Christmas tree on the front porch. That space just needed a tree. I had decided that before we ever even closed on the house!
