Some of you know, some of you don't.... Nathan and I are selling our house.
Wait, scratch that. We SOLD our house.... essentially. All the pieces are there, we just have to sort out the inspection details and move out all our junk. This month has been, without a doubt, the craziest month I have ever experienced. Ever. Seriously.We have wanted to get Hailey out of the school system, in which we currently live, for a long time now. It always seemed like we had plenty of time to make that move, but time has a funny way of catching up with you. The whole situation became far more urgent when I attended the 'Kindergarten Orientation' at her prospective school... just this past spring.
I was horrified. Yes I was.
Ask me sometime about the screaming mother episode I witnessed, or the fact that the school lost her 5-year-old for THREE HOURS before they found him.... unsupervised and outside the building. Wow...really? Sending your little one off on that first day, can be traumatic enough for a parent, imagine factoring in that you don't trust the school to even keep track of your kid. No thanks!
So this summer we got serious about putting our house up and moving. Well... when I say we got 'serious', we actually didn't get a fire under our butts until August. Once that happened though, things moved ridiculously fast - allow me to show you the timeline...
August 2nd - First meeting with our realtor. I like the guy, very nice, knowledgeable, good sense of humor and so tall I think people would pay money to have their pictures taken with him. He gave us a big 'real estate reality check' that boiled down to... "In order to sell in this market, be ready to price your house lower then you can afford." Crap. Not what we wanted to hear. Then, I find out from Hailey's school that they won't give her an out-of -district transfer until I have paperwork that proves we have bought a house elsewhere. This whole thing was not starting off the way we hoped it would.
August 5th - Regardless, we decided to put our house up at a higher price to see what would happen. We concluded that we were not in a hurry, but wanted list it... so we could get an idea of what to expect. If Hailey had to spend a year in the crappy school, at least it would probably only be for a year or so. Plus, her school had all day kindergarten ($$ bonus for us). We called the realtor and started the paperwork.
August 8th - This is that first time that I notice our house is now online. House cleaning begins now.
August 15th - The big 'For Sale' sign goes up in our yard. Neighbors that we barely talk to, come out of the woodwork to proclaim how much they will miss us. The neighbor on our left knocks on our door at 9:30 to check out our house and ask how much we want for it (yeah no joke).
August 16th - Professional realtor pictures taken. I clean the house for 3 hours. Photographer is a jerk, he takes pictures for 4 minutes and speaks only one word the whole time. I take my own pictures after he leaves.
August 19th - Pictures go online. House looks great - like a featured spread in 'Middle Class' Better Homes and Gardens.
August 21st - We have our first showing at 4:30 pm.* (*At this time, I began a full week band camp, so I was not around for the showing).
August 23rd - We get an offer on the house- one which would not put us in debt!
August 24th - Because I am at band camp and away from everything but my cell phone, we do not find out about the offer in until late Wednesday afternoon - on Hailey's birthday.
August 25th - We meet with the realtor to look over the offer and accept it at 8:00am. The closing date is September 23.... less then a month away. At 11:00 am, we schedule a showing at a home we would like to purchase. At 3:00, we put an offer in on that very home.
Then came the bank's turn to move....and this is the point where things stalled out.
The home we want is foreclosed and bank owned. We put a offer in that was significantly lower then the list price (we have to pay closing costs and buy appliances) and received no word on Friday. While we didn't expect to hear anything on that first weekend... it has been over a week and we still haven't gotten a reply!! In the meantime, two more offers have come in on the same house. We are all bidding blindly - not knowing what the others have offered. When the second bid came in, the bank gave us a chance to change our original offer - which we did ($600 more than the asking price). I suppose that was nice on the part of the bank, but I would wager it was because the other couple didn't offer full price either. When the third offer came in... it became a whole different situation.
It feels like I'm playing sudoku - because I guess at that game too.
In my mind's eye, I envision our paperwork sitting on some bank representative's desk... and he's is laughing and twirling his moustache with his fingers. I wouldn't be surprised if the house is tied up to railroad tracks somewhere and they are just seeing who will pay enough to rescue it.
The bottom line is this - we sold our house. Now, we have to be out by the 23rd of this month... and at this point, we have no place to live. Until the bank give us a 'yes' or 'no' we can't move forward. Another weekend has passed (a holiday one at that) and the whole situation really, really stinks. The silver lining to all of this is that we accomplished our purpose in moving in the first place. Hailey will never have to go to that school which frightened me so much *insert wild enthusiastic cheer here*. In fact, instead of attending the school that we hope to be living next to... because of overcrowding... she is starting at the school where I went to kindergarten. Plus, her before and after school care is going to be with our very close, personal friend who lives in that neighborhood. The different parts of Hailey's schooling, fit together perfectly.
All the pieces have fallen neatly into place... except that big one right in the middle... and someone else has their finger on it. It shouldn't be this hard, I just want to finish the puzzle and see what the picture looks like.
*Update - still don't know anything about our offer, but in the time since I started this blog entry... I threw my back out at the grocery store. Excellent. Packing just now got a whole lot trickier.
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