SOLD

I can’t believe that I am writing these words.

SOLD.

Our house is SOLD.

We finally signed the papers and closed on our house last Friday, Dec 31st.

I think I have needed some time to process it all, and it has caused a lot of emotions within me. Honestly, I was so nervous that it wasn’t going to go through that I didn’t take much time to properly process that I was saying goodbye to our first ever home. Obviously, we WANTED it to sell, but the process of actually getting to that place was overwhelming, to say the least.

We first thought about selling our house back in the summer of 2018. We decided to go for it, and listed our house for sale. I went through everything in our house and we had a giant garage sale to get rid of as much stuff as we could. We went on vacation and decided to put our house on the market. There were a few showings, but nothing much happened. I was getting close to my due date with Ezra, so after just one month we took it off the market. It wasn’t a big deal and we were fine with that. We wanted to wait until the Spring to try again.

Ezra was born in November, December was overwhelmed with holiday craziness, Ezra was hospitalized in early January and so we didn’t even have time to think about selling a house during those months. Finally, once the dust started to settle we decided to tackle the sale of our home again. In February of 2019, we moved out of our home and found a small rental property nearby. We were assured that it was a seller’s market and our house should go pretty quickly. We put a few finishing touches on it and then listed our vacant home for sale in March of 2019. Within two hours, we had an excellent offer. We accepted with great joy and began the under contract, behind the scenes process. Those buyers had an inspection and immediately and graciously backed out. We were disappointed but also realized that it is life and we hadn’t wasted any time with that initial offer. Within a week, our house was back on the market and this time it took only 12 hours to receive another fairly decent offer. We will call this offer DUTTM (Drug Us Through The Mud) from here on out because it will be referenced frequently. We accepted the offer and began to proceed with the behind-the-scenes work of selling the home. This includes negotiating, inspections, appraisals, negotiating some more, waiting for bank loans to go through, choosing a move-in date, etc. The process usually takes around 30 days, sometimes more and sometimes less.

After about 25 days under contract with just a few days until closing. We received a call from DUTTM’s agent, who explained that the military loan they had applied for had not gone through and they would like an extension in order to apply for a regular loan. Since the offer was still a good one, we didn’t hesitate to grant the extension. 30 more days were added to the contract, making it now 60 days long. It was whatever. We were annoyed, but also understanding that things like this can happen. We were still living in our tiny rental house and starting to feel uneasy with the relationship with our neighbor. We were paying both mortgage and rent and not looking forward to having to pay all of that for another month…but at the same time putting the house back on the market would mean waiting another 30 days anyways. So we proceeded.

On day 53/60, several extremely destructive tornados came through our area. These tornados destroyed many homes, although our house and the house we were renting were spared. However, any local appraisers immediately gained an immense workload, and the appraiser set to see our house was not able to come. Again, DUTTM asked for an extension, which we granted. We were now looking at 90 days from first offer to closing. 90 days of paying both mortgage and rent. 90 days where I was not running the Airbnb as a second income because technically the house was “under contract”. 90 days of hoping and praying and being so excited to arrive closer and closer to the goal of selling our home. During these 90 days, we were growing increasingly stressed out about the mental health of our neighbor, who was extremely unkind at best and extremely dangerous told our children at his worst.

On or around day 88, we got a phone call. Our agent explained that DUTTHM’s financials were “atrocious” and that there was no way they would ever be able to get a loan to buy our house or any house on the market. Apparently, they had fraudulently indicted wrong numbers on their pre-approval paperwork in order to be able to put the offer on our house. I do believe that they intended to buy our home, but from day one there was no possible way they could have. So for 90 days, our home was tied up and not on the market. The frustration and anger when we got that phone call were immense. I truly struggled through how to deal with my feelings in that moment and in the days and weeks to follow. We were mad. Our realtor was mad. DUTTHM’s realtor was mad. We, of course, asked for the earnest money, which DUTTHM refused to hand over since we technically backed out of the contract as soon as we heard this news. That info is important for a later part of the story.

Soooo…back on the market our house went. We cried a lot of tears. We really didn’t understand WHY and WHAT we should do next. The prime months of house selling were now behind us and we weren’t sure if we should leave it on the market, if we should move back in and leave it on the market, or if we should take it off the market.

I started running the Airbnb again, as paying for both mortgage and rent was getting very expensive! We continued to have showings and run the Airbnb. There was a lot of interest and even another offer. But after hearing our counter offer, they didn’t agree. Didn’t seem like they liked the house very much in the first place.

In October, it became very apparent that we needed to get out of the situation with the neighbor at our rental property. Since our house was still for sale and vacant, we knew it made the most sense to move back in. I didn’t want to live there and run the Airbnb at the same time, so we closed that and moved back in in late October.

We had showings upon showings upon showings during November and December. We usually had between 6-10 showings a week, all while we lived there. We lowered the price on the home, which was frustrating to us. Many people interested in the house were unsure why the house had been on the market so long and wondered what was “wrong” with it. Since we never interacted with the potential buyers, we weren’t able to explain that DUTTM had kept the house under contract for 3 entire months.

Finally, at the end of December, we had an offer. We didn’t think much of it. Offers were great, but did not make it a done deal! The offer was low, far lower than we wanted it to be, but it was also an offer. We accepted the offer and began with the behind the scenes stuff again. Closing date was set for January 30th.

Throughout the month of January, we wavered between having no hope it would actually go through (since that had happened numerous times) and excitedly trying to figure out where we would go live next. It was complicated, for sure. We had been SO excited when we first listed our house to move onto exciting new things, but by this point we were 11 months in and the wind had been taken entirely out of our sales.

In late January, we received a weird notice in the mail. Theo was being informed that he was going to be summoned to court! Now, as a police officer, being summoned to court is not unusual AT ALL. However, receiving the notice in our home mailbox was extremely alarming, because it meant that the person summoning Theo knew our home address. I was a little nervous that someone Theo had arrested had our home address, so I immediately told him to call and figure out what this letter was! Theo called and discovered that DUTTM was suing him because they did not receive their earnest money back. SERIOUSLY? If anyone should get the earnest money after that whole fiasco, it was us! On top of the fraud they committed lying about finances, they continued to keep our house under contract for 90 pointless days!!! And in the end, when we asked for the earnest money….they refused to allow us to have it. Um, that is exactly what earnest money is for. To indicate that the buyer is serious and that if the contract falls through for something that is the buyer’s fault, the seller will be able to take the earnest money. Anyways, they are suing us for earnest money, plus interest, plus court fees. WHAT IN THE ACTUAL WORLD, YA’LL? That whole thing isn’t entirely over yet, so we are still waiting for final word on what to do with that whole situation.

During January, we continued to look for a property to rent or possibly to buy. We looked at MANY homes and none of them fit our family for various reasons. Finally, one week before the closing of our house, we found IT. It was perfect. A house. A barn. FOUR acres. We LOVED it. Suddenly, it seemed to me that things were making sense. We must have waited SO LONG to sell our house so we could providentially find THIS house at THIS time. We heard that there was already an offer on the house, but that they would be glad to accept ours. It was a total mind game. Do we offer over and hope to outbid the other offer, or do offer low and hope to make a good steal (and possible still be higher than the other offer!). We went ahead and put in our offer and waited with bated breath for a response. We finally heard back…rejected.

I was extremely disappointed, but it also made our next steps a little simpler. We had ONE week to find a place to live, which meant that we had to choose between our two top rental property contenders. We settled on one nearby and moved in on Thursday, January 30th.

On Friday, January 31st, we woke up to a text from our agent saying that the buyers couldn’t make it to the 2:00 closing time, but they would sign later in the day. My stomach dropped and I was terrified that the buyers were going to back out, even after we had packed and moved out of our house. I could hardly breathe all day until I got the text that they had signed the papers and our house was officially SOLD!!!

SOLD.

I know that if anyone is still reading this, you are about as mentally exhausted as we are at this point. What is next? We are still praying and thinking and searching to see what is next. We are so grateful and relieved that our home is sold and as of Friday we have exactly $0 in debt, which is a fantastic feeling!