I was sadly mistaken in my belief that life would get back to normal after the holidays. Ever since we’ve moved to Longmont Jaeger has been wanting to move away from it. We moved to Longmont because, at the time, it was half way between my workplace and his. However, now that I’m mostly working from home, it’s much harder to justify living in Longmont.
In January we talked to our friendly real estate agent and she suggested we should try to get our house ready to sell as soon as possible because there were very few choices on the market at that point. This upped the timeline I had been considering by a couple of months so January and February we spent frantically trying to get the house up to snuff. This involved donating a massive amount of stuff to thrift stores. We also spent a lot of time and money refreshing the house in hopes it’d look like someplace someone else would like to buy. I started getting a little obsessive and each time Jan, our real estate agent, emailed to see if we were ready to list, I would mention two or three new things I had discovered that needed to be done to the house. Eventually she told me we should go ahead and list now because the house would never be perfect and there would always be something else to fix.
Our house went on the market on March 2. I had been reading staging and real estate books for about a year and one thing they all emphasized was it was important to have an immaculately clean house. Well, I like a clean house anyway but with a toddler, the realty often falls short of my goal. However, for our house showings I think I managed to keep the house to a neat-enough level that Jaeger started worrying about my sanity (and possibly his). We got one offer that was lower than we felt our house was worth. Even with countering we couldn’t bring it up to a level we wanted so we passed. In the mean time, we found a property that looked interesting down in Boulder. It needed a little work but was a level that we could do without bankrupting ourselves (probably). I really didn’t want to offer without having an offer for our house. However, the housing options were really, really low (in fact, there still hasn’t been another house listed we’d consider). This was the first house that both Jaeger and I thought we could live in so we went ahead and made an offer. After a bit of haggling, we agreed on a price for the new house.
I had a weekly cleaning service scheduled to come in on Tuesdays. However, we were getting a lot of showings so it was tricky to make sure the cleaners didn’t come during the showings. One Tuesday afternoon I had a showing scheduled for the morning so I called the cleaners and asked if they could come later in the day. I gave them the time of the showing and they said they’d come in early afternoon instead. Then, I got a call for a second showing later in the morning but didn’t bother telling the cleaners since they were planning to come in the afternoon. Then I got another call for an agent walk-through in the afternoon. I asked my agent if I needed to reschedule or cancel the cleaners and she thought the other real estate agent would be fine with cleaners being there while she evaluated whether it was worth bringing her clients through. So, I didn’t change the schedule. Between the 2nd morning showing and the agent showing in the afternoon I nipped home to grab some stuff before heading out for lunch. To my horror, I discovered the cleaners had already been there. I prayed that they had just been extra efficient and had somehow managed to clean the entire house in 40 minutes.
A couple of days later our agent emailed to say that there was a couple that wanted to make an offer on our house. Apparently they were the couple that were scheduled on the 2nd showing on Tuesday and my cleaners had come while they were there. However, it turns out they were very impressed that I had a cleaning service coming to make sure the house was in good shape. So, it turns out what I had been stressing over was an advantage after all. Also, I felt slightly justified in the obsessive lengths I had gone in cleaning the home since that was obviously important to these people. The offer came in and after a bit of haggling, we accepted the offer.
The next couple of weeks were probably more stressful than anything else. I was stressing over whether our loan was going to work out (we wanted to put 20% down but needed our home equity for that and the lender was dubious about same-day closings) and I worked on packing and all the other details that go with moving. To my surprise and great relief, we closed on time and everything ended up working out perfectly.
We started the move into our new home the last weekend in April. So far, the house has a myriad of little quirks but I’m liking living here much more than I expected. The house has a fully fenced back yard so Calvin doesn’t need much supervision outside. He spends hours entertaining himself outside which frees me up to unpack, work, and do other chores. It’s amazing.
One of the things that needed to be redone was the painting. We basically need to repaint the entire house. This isn’t something I want to take on myself. Among other things, we now have a vaulted ceiling. When the painter came he took a look and told us that painting the house, and fixing some of the existing paint quirks, would take a full week. This is the painting week. So right now Jaeger and I are stuck in a half-packed/half-unpacked limbo. Our essentially stuff has been unpacked and stored. However, our many boxes of books are piled in the middle of each room along with all our furniture so our painters can paint everything.
It’s going to be fantastic when it’s done. Today was the first day they started and already it’s looking much better. However, I’m tired of not being able to live in my house. I will be very glad when we can really unpack and get settled in to this house.
