synthaetic synapse

no, actually, i think we’re doing okay.

what happened was that we….well, i have to back-track considerably, don’t i. bah.

okay, so, like we had an offer on this house in-town, contingent upon the sale of our current house. well, after several weeks, somebody else came along and put an offer on that house, and their offer apparently wasn’t contingent. not nice. so, the only way we could beat that was to make our offer non-contingent (we were pretty confident that the other offer wasn’t for more money than we had offered). the spouse unit and her wonderful credit found a way to remove contingency, and not only that, but provided that we would sell our current house by the end of May, we wouldn’t even have to pay two mortgages at the same time. and even better, with a bridge loan against our current house, we won’t actually even pay the down-payment on the new house until June.

yeah, her credit’s scarily awesome.

so, long story short (for this part of it, anyway), we removed the contingency, making ours the best offer, and we got the house. we’ve already hauled over what could be fit in the mini-van in several car-loads, and already have two of the bedrooms primed for color changes. with the snow having finally melted, we discovered that our house has a pond, which is kind of cool, and the kids have already made friends with some of the neighbor kids. we start the big move next weekend, but the focus this week is on getting some of the rooms repainted (really just the kids’ rooms and my office) before we move stuff in.

AND THEN, we finally got an offer on the current house early last week. a couple from Duluth came out with a family member (for the third time, no less!) and made an offer the following day. we were pretty skeptical at first, as their offer was for $20K below what we were asking. in fact, to a large degree, while we were happy to get an offer, the offer itself really pissed us off. well, as it happened, this other realtor had a client who wanted to see it again, so when she called, i let her know we had an offer on the house, but that we’d love to hear from her client. sure enough, the evening after she came by, we had a second offer. this one was a stronger offer, and cash.

now, when we got that first offer, we pissed off our realtor by not accepting it right away. and we hadn’t accepted it when the second offer came through. as soon as that second offer came through, though, our realtor was on the phone with the realtor with the first offer, and all of-the-sudden, they re-offer for the whole amount we were asking. yup. the whole amount. (and we found out later they were willing to go as far as $1,000 above our original asking price! i guess their first offer was purely speculative. i’m glad they got the house, since they obviously wanted it so much, just as we did when we first moved here. i like keeping the good karma flowing.)

so, another long story short, we close on this house on May 2. i’m still not thrilled with moving. i like the new place well enough, but i’m not happy at all about moving out of here. i guess the challenge for the rest of my career will be to be earning enough and saving enough so that we can move back out to a place like this when we retire. but in the meantime, all those questions are finally answered and our future is a bit more secure. thanks to the way things went with the sale of this house, we’ll make a tidy sum off the sale of this house, beef the kids’ college funds back up, have everything else paid off, and money to spare. i guess it’s a win-win all the way around. i just still don’t want to do this moving-painting-moving crap, but i guess i need to get over it!