Monday, August 1, 2011

Life In The Fast Lane

So.  Things were going along nicely.  We were looking for homes in Park City, and actually found one that kept rising to the top of our searches and we made a "Favorites" tag for it on the Real Estate lists.  However I was enjoying taking my time, looking things over, and considering all my options.  As is my tendency.
Then all hell broke loose when someone else put an offer on that house.  Suddenly we were in choose it or loose it situation.  It wasn't a tough decision, for about not terribly much more than we expected to get from our current house we'd double our square footage, go from .11th of an acre to 1/2 an acre, and Hubby would get a REAL office in the MIL apartment above the garage.  We put in a bid, the sellers threw out the other bid and accepted our bid.
This was all three or four weeks ago.  We got the mortgage paperwork ready to go to close August 20th to get the kids in school in the new neighborhood, then recently decided why wait and proposed closing August 12th.  

In the mean time we were in crisis mode to GET OUR STUFF OUT OF OUR HOUSE.  My darling sweet sister and my parents put themselves at our disposal and dropped their lives for several days at a time and came down to help me purge and pack.  We rented a POD (which required a permit, and a trip to the city engineers to rent the space in front of our house, and a trip to a barricade company to rent four flashing barricades for the four corners of the pod) and started to fill said POD with all of our immediately unnecessary yet precious possessions.  I figured we would have an open house while our family joined my larger family for our annual vacation to Jackson Hole.  All efforts were focused on getting our house ready for the market.  Thing 2 got her cast off during this time and I promised her that once the house was on the market I'd take them swimming and we'd have the rest of our summer to do all those things she was wanting to do.  Thing 2's birthday fell in this time period as well, and we negotiated with her to have her friend party in August, and her family party while we were on vacation in Jackson. She was excited about this, luckily.  
We had the POD for two weeks, in which time we filled it completely full.  Hubby arranged to be home the week that we left for Jackson and as a group we busted our collective butts and had the house ready to show by Friday July 29th, the day we left for Jackson.  The house was open on July 30th and 31st.  We had an offer for $10,000.00 less than our asking price waiting in my email on the morning of the 31st.  While I would love to get more, at this point I am so thrilled to have the house sell IMMEDIATELY I am disinclined to argue too much.  And they want to close August 17th.  Today, August 1st, we will accept the offer by the 5:00 deadline, but I'm waiting to see if there's a way to juggle the closing of the Park City house back a few days so we can do the closings on the same day, thus avoiding carrying two mortgages even for a few minutes.  
Though it wouldn't be tragic if we got the Park City house first, then were able to do a little painting up there and move some stuff up before our current house closed.  
In any event the usually lovely and relaxing Jackson Hole family vacation has developed something of a real estate haze over it for me.

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