Sold!

I've wanted to say this for nearly two years and I finally can. We SOLD our house! Call us insane in this market, but we feel good about it. I have mixed emotions about leaving our house (I brought my 2 babies home to this house), but in general I'm very excited (hello backyard)!

Listing our house kind of took a leap of faith for me. In this hot market, contingent offers don't fly and we haven't had any success with the offers we've made so far.  Our chances will  really increase once we've closed and can remove the contingency. (We'll be able to offer a 10-day close and we'll have the cash equity we made in our bank account.) After hearing that the lot we wanted to build on was out of our price-range, we asked ourselves what we were waiting for. Initially, we were considering waiting to list until Memorial Day, but once we made up our minds, I was far too antsy to wait an instant longer. Our house hit the market on Thursday, May 13.

Keeping our house spotless with 2 messy babes was no easy feat, but we survived. We only had to have our house on the market for 1 weekend. Hallelujah! We spent most of the time at my parent's house. Andrew teased me because I went a little over-board and was a bit obsessive in my cleaning/staging. It was hard to have the garbage can in the garage, our hampers in the basement, the toilet paper and soap hidden under the sinks, and no appliances out. I'd say our hard work paid off though. We ended up having over 25 showings and getting 8 offers!

All 8 offers were over the list price (439k) and we feel very blessed that we had so many options to choose from.  I've struggled with  inquisitive neighbors throughout this process and am sick of being asked personal financial questions. I try to remind myself that people are only trying to be nice, but it feels like people just want the latest neighborhood gossip.  Here's as much as I'll give you and shhhh, I haven't told the neighbors this, but we will make over $250k on our house, which is a big part of why we decided to sell it.

When the bids first started coming in, our realtor, Deea, kept saying, "This isn't the offer that I'll come do cartwheels in your yard for." That offer finally did come though and I was nearly doing cartwheels myself. The offer was much higher than the list price and much more than we anticipated that we'd get. Additionally, the buyers offered to let us rent-back the house for free until August 7th and they waived the appraisal which we were thrilled about. Apparently appraisals have been coming in quite low and aren't quite keeping up with the market, so we're relived not to have to worry about that. I was pretty stressed about our inspection because I know there are some things that need to be replaced in our house soon (water heater, AC, windows), but we were able to negotiate with the buyers.

Today, we officially have $10,000 in earnest money from the buyers, so if they decide to back-out, we'll get to keep that. We close on June 8 which can't come soon enough! I'm ready to pull out aggressive Jenna and bid my heart out on a new house. I have been holding off writing this post because I wanted to be able to have our ending figured out. Just this week, we offered on some beautiful land in a prime location, but we just found out we didn't get it. Oh well. We don't know where we're going yet, but we do know that moving is the right thing for us and are anxious to see where we end up.