Selling, Buying and Moving

Selling a house is difficult.  Buying a house can be disappointing.  Moving is exhausting.  That's my opinion.

We "had it easy" selling our home and it was still difficult.  Someone came to us when our house was on "Make Me Move" on zillow.com.  So after putting it on the market three times over 4 years we had given up.  We had taken down all our pictures, removed furniture, tried to declutter (I am not good at that) and moved a large amount of clutter to storage.  Each time we did this, I was pregnant.  Each time DH had done more improvements.  Each time we did not sell and there was a lot of disappointment with that since no one even made an offer after all the work we had put into the house and each showing.  After the third child we left the house on zillow.com's "Make Me Move" and only talked about putting it back on the market. 

This February we received a call from a real estate agent.  She said, "I have a client that wants to buy your house."  I was stunned. Each previous call from an agent went  no where so after a quick recovery I refered her to my DH and figured we'd never hear any more about it.  After DH spoke with the agent we had about 10 days to pull together the house for a showing.  No time to move everything out, no time to hide anything.  These poor people were going to see us in our fully cluttered glory!

Our showing was fast.  We didn't have an agent so I stayed and DH took the kids out.  He was barely out before I called him back.  That was a Saturday afternoon.  Then we waited.  Until Thursday when we received an offer.  I was so excited I almost fell over.  After a weekend of negotions we came to an agreement by Monday.  We had found a great real estate lawyer so we figured we were set.  Later we realized we could have used an agent.  But that's a whole other story.

So now we had to find a house.  Our contract gave us until April 15th with a contigency of May 31st.