The house hunt

So, here's the story of our house hunt. The week before Christmas my little brother, Todd, and I were chatting about our house and Todd ended up offering to help us with a down payment for a new house so we wouldn't have to wait another year or so to find a new house that would fit us better. Merry Christmas to us. I had our realtor who had helped us buy this house come by that week and go over what we could do to get our house ready to sale. Mostly this included de-cluttering and moving some big pieces of furniture out so or house would look bigger. We also decided to do some painting and get new carpet since ours was well used and couldn't get all the way clean. And Annie decided to pour an entire bottle of white out all over the carpet in her room. Good thing we were replacing the carpet anyway. :)

So the day after Christmas I started packing away lots of toys and books and junk. We quickly filled our garage and I think in the course of the next month I rearranged the garage 3 times to fit all the boxes I was packing up. We got all the painting and re-carpeting done the week after Christmas when my parents were visiting Todd and Savannah in Seattle, so we got to stay at their house while our house was getting fixed up. I learned that the fastest way to clean out a house is to paint inside and put down new carpet because then you have to take everything off the walls and out of the bedrooms. Instead of putting everything back in it's place after it's done, I just put it in boxes and out in the garage.

The next week Jake's parents came to visit, and Janet helped clean our house really well, so the week after they left I just had a few last things to do, then we moved the extra furniture and a lot of the boxes into a friend's parent's garage--they just bought the house in January, but won't be moving in until this summer, and in the meantime the friend's sister is living there, so there was plenty of room for storage in the garage. At that point we were ready to list the house. Less than 4 weeks after finding out we were going to sale. It sure was a whirlwind month.

We listed our house on a Wednesday, and on Saturday night we got an offer. We had been out to look at houses a few times and nothing was jumping out at us. There was a house I had liked from the start, but Jacob wasn't sold on it, so we were a little wary about accepting an offer when it looked like nothing was out there for us. So we didn't accept or counter the offer. But we did go out and look at a few houses again on Tuesday and found two that we both liked and felt good about. So we put in our counter-offer a few days after the deadline had passed, knowing that our buyer was still interested in our house. I was expecting a quick response because I knew she had a deadline before she had to head back to DC and she wanted to get the house stuff taken care of before that. As time passed and we didn't hear anything I began to get a bit anxious. She didn't respond by our deadline, and I was sure that by us waiting we had spoiled everything and given her a chance to look and find another house she liked better. I started worrying that our house would be on the market for months and that her offer ($10,000 below our asking price) was as good as it would get. I finally accepted that maybe it wasn't meant to be with this buyer and that things would work out how they were supposed to, and within a half hour of my change of heart we got the phone call that the buyer was going to accept our counter offer (of what we originally listed it for and $1,000 in closing costs), but just hadn't had a chance to meet with her realtor to sign the papers. Phew! So the next day (Monday) we got the signed paperwork and our house was officially under contract.

With our house sold (barring any issues with the inspection, appraisal, etc.) it was time to buy our new house. We put our offer in on Tuesday, got a counter offer back the next day and accepted their counter offer. So by Thursday we were officially going to be buying this house:

We will close on our new house on March 8th. Since our buyer isn't moving here from DC until April we set that closing date as March 27th. So we'll have almost 3 weeks to get most of the rooms inside painted, then move, then clean the old house. Hopefully it's plenty of time.

And now that we have a house to buy we've had tons of papers to read and sign. Such a pain. I am so excited for this all to be done and not have to move ever again (hopefully). The new house has 4 bedrooms upstairs and one downstairs, so we'll have an official guest room for visitors to use. Though it may be a while before there's anything besides a blow-up mattress to sleep on. This new house is double the square feet of our current house, so we'll have lots of empty space for a while as we slowly acquire furniture for all the extra rooms. The kids will have a blast running around in all the empty space. And on the stairs. Rachel was very insistent on getting a house with stairs. Any time we looked at a one-story house she automatically didn't like it just because there were no stairs. :) Hello baby gates... And hello boxes. Time to start packing.