We Sold the House

Our Pleasant View house is sold. (That probably deserved an exclamation mark, but I'm pretty tired.)

(Mike texted the above photo last week with the words "last farewell". Definitely one of those long, drawn-out farewells.)

It really was an exhausting and wild thing selling that house. Not just the moving twelve people and fifteen years' worth of living out of it, and not just the cleaning and patching and painting and fixing either. Though those things would have been plenty--even if it had sold right away. But it did not sell right away. It was on the market for nearly six months (we paid rent up here while making our house payment down there for eight months). And it's hard to pinpoint why on earth it wouldn't sell! It's a lovely home. No horrendously outdated things to it. No major things wrong with it. We priced it well. (One realtor mentioned that we were priced the lowest per square footage in the area). And it had plenty of interest even. In fact, we had fifty showings. (You read that right. FIFTY. Can you imagine if we'd been living there still and I'd had to get it spotless and everyone out of the house for an hour fifty times?) We had seven offers. SEVEN offers! They would come in clusters--so we would accept one of three offers or one of two offers and then ... something would fall through on their end, or they'd bow out before some technical thing was signed on the contract. We had one offer that fell through the very week we were supposed to close on the house (though they did end up being the ones that eventually did buy our house). 

I did see an article not long ago saying that home sells were the worst in the US they'd been in 30 years. We happened to be selling right at a time when interest rates were high and home prices soaring. Still ... I don't know if any of those factors can account for the craziness of offers and showings and nothing ever working for so long. It was just pure madness. And tremendously stressful. And such a relief to finally have it done.

And now ...

There are still a lot of steps, but we can hopefully begin moving in earnest towards creating a new home for our family! (And that does get an exclamation mark.)