Sunday, November 01, 2009

House

So the very last day our house was on the market was the Saturday of Labor Day weekend. Our contract with our realtor was up and we decided not to renew... it was on the market for a year and nothing was happening. That day, we were headed to Geoff's aunt and uncle's house for wine tasting and a BBQ. I made the bed and straightened up a bit, and Geoff laughed at me while I did it. "Why are you bothering? No one has looked at the house in months." I thought, well, yeah, but it's Labor Day weekend and a nice day, someone might come out. And it's the last day we'll have to make our bed for a loooong time!

Someone DID call and want to look at our house that day, which we laughed about and then didn't think anything of. We made plans to schedule a fence replacement that week and our realtor called about taking down the sign and lockbox. But then on Tuesday... we got a call that the people that looked at our house LIKED it... so much that they wanted to make an offer. They looked at 18 houses over the weekend and ours was the only one they had any real interst in, and were confused and disappointed that it had disappeared from the MLS. They had originally planned to make an offer on Wednesday, but the whole expired listing thing threw that off. So they came back Thursday to look at it a second time. On Friday they made an offer, and by Saturday they accepted our counter off. Sunday they came a third time so they could show their daughter (who is 8) the house. 2 months later, it seems like it all happened very quickly, but Geoff and I were "cautiously optimistic" throughout the entire week so it went by veerrryy slowly.

They still had to have their inspection and all of that, so I remained cautiously optimistic and didn't start packing or anything. But the inspection was okay and their repair requests were reasonable. So the last week of September we started packing and planning. We always knew that if we sold our house, we'd live in the RV, so we started arranging for that. We found an RV park we could stay in, arranged for doggy daycare for the dogs, and got ourselves a storage unit. Everything really fell into place perfectly - we hadn't gone to schedule the fence repair yet, we had already ordered some things for RV "upgrades" (like additional storage and little things to better use our space - originally just for camping trips!), and who knows what else.

We moved Saturday, October 17, closed Monday, October 19, and went to Chicago/Northwestern for my 5th year college reunion Wednesday, October 21. It was CRAZY for 2 or 3 weeks there getting everything all finalized, but we're back and have been in the camper for exactly a week now. We both are really loving it. The park where we're staying is really nice and it's in a great location. So that's one piece of big news... we've sold our house and are living in the camper. The only horrible thing is the speed limit in the park - "walking speed". Do you know how hard it is to drive "walking speed"? A friend who came to visit stalled his car trying to drive so slowly! Ha...