New House, House Sale, Life Changes

Sorry for the absence recently.  Things got a little crazy, and I didn’t open my laptop for over 2 weeks, except for quick research or to order something.  I haven’t even been taking pictures of Jenson lately, so we’ll refer to these as the lost weeks of his youth.  Now that he’s almost 18 months, I’m going to dial down from the weekly updates anyway, so it seems like a good time to do it.  The next month is going to be a bit hairy, and then after that……I have no idea.  Life will change completely, forever.  And while we have a great life now, I can’t wait.  We are moving!  We finally found the property we’ve been looking for.  We wanted an older house (read: character versus cookie cutter house), 3+ acres, either farmland or woods (preference on both, but that’s hard to find, so preference on the woods over farm), an old barn, a stream or some other fun little detail on the land, set back from the road, and privacy.  We got it all except the farmland and barn.  It’ll be 45 minutes outside of Columbus, but only 20-25 from Lo’s work.  It’s just on the edge of a town, so it’s actually really walkable because there are sidewalks that reach almost to our property and lead into the center of town about a mile away.  Oh, the best part?  I’m leaving my job so I can be the mom that I want to be…present.  I will finally have more than 2 hours with Jenson a day.  And he will grow up getting to play in nature, instead of the .20 acre square of grass on which our current property sits.  How can we expect our kids to play outside when we give them a postage stamp worth of grass to play on?  And sadly the world isn’t as safe as it used to be…we can’t just turn them loose to run around the neighborhoods and tell them to come back when the street lights turn on.

So we spent weeks getting our house ready to list.  It was SOOO much work!  We accumulated an insane amount of stuff in 3 years, including a dog and a kid, lol.  We busted our asses around the house every night after Jenson went to bed….packing stuff up to go in storage, decluttering, cleaning.  Our realtor sent over the women they use for home staging and she walked through and told us what we needed to do in every room to get it ready to list.  It wasn’t as bad as I expected actually – she said we were in pretty good shape – we just needed to clean out every room to just the essential furniture, an de-baby/de-dog our house, and rearrange some furniture.  Hence the storage unit.  The storage unit is near Lo’s work, so he loaded up the van and took a full load of bins and boxes every day.  Once we move, he’ll just bring a load to the new house each day after work.  We bought a bunch of these large storage bins at Target (not an affiliate link, just saving you some time) – they are the best deal – trust me, I already did the research.  They are bigger than what I think of as the standard size storage bin, but small enough that one person can lift them even if they are jam packed full.  It’s the perfect size, and the price at Target is better than anywhere else, especially if combined with a coupon code like Target offers every now and then (10% off $50 for storage and organization the last time I ordered).  We’re using a lot of boxes too, but I don’t like to store things long term in boxes because of the higher chance of moisture or bugs. Luckily our new house has a full basement (that is dry from what our inspection could tell), so we’ll have even more storage at that house (but I’m determined to keep more control on it).

Once our house was ready, we had the photos taken and got the listing up on Thursday night, with a planned open house for Sunday.  We did expect to have some offers within the first week, as our neighborhood is in a high demand area/school district with little inventory around our price point, but we didn’t know how good of offers we could expect.  Luckily there was a flurry of showing requests and a couple of offers within the first day, so we asked for best and final by Saturday evening and had 4 good offers.  We picked the one that seemed the strongest – it also happened to be the highest, but we were more drawn to the fact that he didn’t have a home sale contingency (like another offer) and has a 15-20% downpayment (unlike 2 of the loans, which were FHA).  With a large downpayment, his loan is more likely to be approved and we won’t have to start over if the deal falls through.  So we are in contract!  Yay!  We are estimated to close 2 weeks after we close on our new house.

So now we have some  breathing room from the rush of packing.  We need to continue, of course, but not at the frantic pace we were.  We were so excited to have free time over the weekend that (other than being away during the Saturday showings), we just sat around and played with Jenson.  On Friday night we had to stay away from the house until 7:30 pm because of showings, and when we got home, we put Jenson to bed and went to bed ourselves.  We were in bed by 8:30 pm.  It was crazy. I slept for a full 12 hours and it was amazing.  We are happy to be able to make a mess now – or at least use our dishwasher, cook, put clothing in our hampers, etc.

But now it’s a waiting game…waiting for our loan to be approved…waiting for the inspection/appraisal to sell our house…waiting for our buyers loan to be approved…

In the meantime, I put in my notice of resignation.  That was scary (though my manager was aware that this was all happening).  But it’s so exciting, even if it still hasn’t sunk in.

But this.