Moving On...

I’ve been waiting for a bit to write this post and it’s going to be a long one (you’ve been warned). My last post (in April!!!) was about the addition we wanted to do to our home. We had plans drawn, talked to the city and everything was ready to go… we just had to get the construction loan. I call that the beginning of the end of that project.

We talked to several banks and went through the entire process only to have our home appraise for about $30k less than we needed. For those of you who have followed for a while (even during the absences) you know that I’m a realtor. I determined what I thought the house was worth based on comparables way before applying for the loan so I was shocked at the number. Mind you, all of this took about two months to fall apart. At that point, we decided to just sell the house. Yes, after all of the work I’ve done I was finally on board with selling.

We decided to purchase a piece of land and build a new home. I knew it was going to be difficult and time-consuming but we were all on board. We found an amazing piece of land and started the construction loan process. The land was located in a booming area of town and we were excited to get started on the building process. We even created the perfect elevation/floorplan.

Elevation for our dream home.

With all of this rolling along, we decided to list our house. We listed our house at the end of June but I took it off soon after because my neighbor was also selling their house and they NEEDED to sell their house. They went under contract so I put ours back on the market. Within 3 days, we had several interested buyers and went under contract at a record-setting amount. We were so excited!!! Oh… and did I mention we sold for the price I told the appraiser I thought it was worth all of those months ago when we tried to do the addition?

The end of an era.

Apparently selling the house was to be the only easy part. Can you guess what happened when the appraisal was done for the land? You guessed it - it didn’t make value. And guess when I found this out? Two weeks before we closed on our home and on the airplane back from vacation with the hubs. Sigh…

Two weeks later, we moved into a rental. We had no idea where we would be living. We finally found another piece of land. We went under contract only to find the owner had a lawsuit filed against him. We cancelled and found a third piece of land but, alas, our house was about 2’ too wide to meet HOA setback requirements.

At my wits end, I decided to go a different route. I sell a lot of homes in a particular neighborhood. This neighborhood is 20 minutes from our current home, in a different school district and actually in a neighborhood… something we haven’t dealt with in 8 years. There was a house on the market there for months. Just sitting there. On a whim, I called my good friend, Erica, and asked if she wanted to go look at it with me. I had very low expectations judging by the online photos but went anyway.

Erica and I walked in and both said “wow”. The house was 100x better than the pics in the MLS. We both really loved it so I decided to see if the hubs wanted to check it out. I knew within about 5 minutes of him being in the house that he loved it too.

The final piece of the puzzle - the kids. The move would put the hubs and I 20 minutes closer to work - saving each of us 40 minutes each day. But the kiddos…. well they had the most to lose with the move. They’ve been in the same school since kindergarten. All of their friends were in that school. I sat them down and explained we found a house and everything that went along with it. We took them to see it and they fell in love. My daughter has been wanting to leave the tiny town we lived in for years. My son - not so much. He wanted to move but was nervous to go to a new school but decided to make the move.

The new house!

With all of that, we made an offer and it was accepted. Woo hoo! We decided to go ahead and enroll the kids in the new school since we were only 2 weeks into the school year. And guess what? They love it! They are both over-the-moon with their new schools. They have tons of new friends and can’t wait to get into the new house. We have been driving 20 minutes to the new school from the rental each day for almost a month so that is adding to the anticipation. We close on Wednesday of this week and move in on Thursday. Stay tuned for the official walk-through pics because I will be doing A LOT of work on this beauty!