It's a fact that Justin and I do not like having to make major decisions. We avoid them at all costs. Unfortunately in the 15 years we have been together, we have had to make a few major decisions: Deciding where to move after I completed school, buying our first house, and naming our three little ones.
Over the last two months, we have had to make many more decisions. This period of time has been the most stressful time of our lives (or at least it has felt like that). Ten weeks on bed rest, not knowing when the twins would be born and hoping they would be healthy doesn't compare to the anxiety I have felt these past two months.
We have always thought it would be ideal to live outside of town, on a nice sized lot. We both want a little more room than we currently have now. We've thought it would be fun to build our own house some day although if we found a lot with a nice house, that would suffice too. Little did I know, Justin had been keeping his eyes open for available lots around the metro. A few months ago he found an acre lot north of Urbandale. He kept his eye on it for a bit and a few weeks after he first noticed it, the price dropped. He then showed me where the lot was on the map and a couple weeks later while I was driving one of the twins around, (trying to get a teething twin to nap), I decided to swing by it. I immediately feel in love with the location, the neighborhood and the size of the lot. However, the surrounding homes were pretty intimidating and I found myself being really annoyed that Justin sent me to look at a lot we could never afford.
As the weeks went by, we got all of our finances in place "just in case" we found something, and discovered that maybe this lot wasn't too out of reach. From time to time we would drive by the lot, while AJ sat in the backseat complaining about why we kept wanting to look at it. We also did a lot of investigating with regards to other lots that were available and new developments that were on the rise. One evening we wrote down all the pros and cons of the lot. No matter what we found, we kept coming back to this one particular lot. We knew this opportunity would never surface again-this amount of land, for this price, in a beautiful/desirable location. We decided to take a chance and in early August, while we were "vacationing" in Okoboji with my cousin and her husband, we put in an offer. We found out that evening that the seller was a physician who was vacationing in Utah at the time. I immediately thought he would reject the offer and I started thinking "it wasn't meant to be." We ended up getting the lot below asking price. We then had two weeks to back out if anything should come up.
We quickly met with a builder/contractor who looked at the lot with us. He immediately told us to add $20,000 onto the price of the land for installation of a septic system, extra concrete and a culvert. What!? I was ready to back out at that time, thinking maybe this wasn't meant to be. Instead we hurried and met with another builder who estimated these costs to be less. We were very impressed with this particular builder and he believed he could give us the home we wanted within our price range-bonus! Things were starting to look up again and we decided to keep the lot.
Then we had to decide what to do with our current home. Sell now, sell this Spring (when the market is better), use a realtor or add to our stress and sell by ourselves. We decided the latter in hopes of saving a little money. We had two Realtors comes through the home to help with pricing and staging of the home. Less than 3 weeks later, we were on the market. We listed the price at the high end of the range, knowing that most buyers do not ask full price.
I was pretty naive with the entire process. I really didn't expect any showings until we had our first open house, which I was planning on doing in a couple weeks. The day after Labor Day, I received a call from a realtor wanting to show my house that day at 5:00. I freaked out a little bit, called my mom, and asked if she could meet me at my house to help me get everything ready. Obviously, we had already de-cluttered and had pretty much staged the house, but some cleaning was needed. We worked our butts off for a few hours but everything looked great. There were a number of items we had to move out of the house: high chairs, the kids chairs that are in the living room, Milo's stuff (and Milo), our laundry basket, etc. (I'll never forget when one Realtor called me saying "a big black cat just ran into your house." I made up a silly story that it was the neighbor's cat that the kids had taken a liking to).
Later that evening after Alena's soccer practice we moved everything back in. Wednesday morning I got another call...We had a showing (or two) almost every day that first week. Friday of that week a realtor called stating her buyers wanted to go through the home a second time. I grabbed Milo and drove over to Homemakers. He hung out in the truck while I did a little shopping. Saturday morning we received an offer. We weren't too impressed with the offer so countered back. Later that afternoon, they countered back to us. I had already committed to another showing the following day and another realtor called Saturday to say his buyers wanted to take a second look at the house. We decided we weren't going to give our current bidders an answer to their counter until Monday morning. Meanwhile, they became nervous and upped their bid. We waited all day Sunday for another offer to come in, but it never did. Monday morning we accepted their current bid. Although less than the asking price, it is the price we were hoping for. After they tried to bully us after the inspection, we didn't back down and will close this Friday on the house.
Needless to say, I never want to sell a house again. Running home every day to get my house in order, leaving the house each evening, and waiting for offers to come in, is stressful. I'm so glad we only had to do that for a week-I can't imagine those who do this for months.
We better start getting better at making decisions, because it looks like we have a lot of decisions ahead of us...
No comments:
Post a Comment