House-Selling Update & Some Real Talk

Jamie and I have both tried really hard to stay relaxed, patient, and level-headed when it comes to this whole house-selling thing, but I about lost my cool Sunday when I got a text from our realtor saying that the people coming to see our home that morning would need to reschedule. Major sad face. The showing was supposed to be at 11:30, and I got this text at 11:45, and I started quietly huffin’ and puffin’ until Jamie made me laugh by saying “Well, at least our house is clean”.

Arg. Good thing we were at the tail end of a bible study so that I could pray for some patience instead of losing my marbles because boy oh boy… I was hot. Not at our realtor, of course. I love her. But just at the whole situation. We’d had quite the morning…

Oh, it was just chaos. Hours worth of snowfall came down out of nowhere that morning, causing Jamie to shift his focus from helping me clean and stage the house to trying to handle this snow. We kept waiting for the cancelation text, and it just wasn’t coming. We therefore had no choice but to keep on getting things ready. Snow doesn’t slow Kansans down, so we assumed they were still coming to see the house.

At 7:30 a.m. (pre snow), Jamie ran Teddy across town to doggy daycare since we would be at church most of the morning.

At 8:15 he was running back out to Home Depot to get salt to put on our driveway to try to get ahead of the snow that was seemingly coming down out of nowhere. (“Let’s just wait and see if it starts accumulating.” Two minutes later: “Uh, I think it’s starting to accumulate.”)

At 9:28 we were finally rolling out of the driveway to church while I about near had a heart attack the entire six mile drive there. The snow was coming down so hard that you’d think it was blizzarding. I made Hadley stop talking because my nerves couldn’t handle her weird noise-making. I demanded Jamie drive approximately 12 mph. I reached back mid-drive to make sure the girls seat belts were tightened down as much as they could be; I just knew we were going off the side of the road down into an embarkment or a car coming the opposite way might skid out and hit us. TERR.I.FIED. I’m usually not a “worst case scenario” girl, but for some reason I was feeling a bit tense. (Jamie will roar when he reads this because to say I was a bit tense is probably an understatement to him – har har.)

At one point I told Jamie to turn around and go back home, even though we were closer to church than we were to home. “Erica, we’ll be fine” is all he kept saying in a quiet voice that convinced me none. I know he wanted to knock my lights out every time I clutched the side handle, but he kept it together and tolerated my passenger-seat driving. (He’d even surprised me by putting hazelnut creamer and a packet of sugar in a travel coffee mug ahead of time and filled it up at church despite me acting very similarly all morning to the person in the below video. HE IS TOO GOOD TO ME.)

The whole reason we were so adamant about going to church in the first place is because they’re offering a four-week parenting class, and this was week two. We loved the prior week so much and found the information and teaching so incredibly valuable that we didn’t want to miss even one week of the four-week course. Someone wants to teach us practical ways to raise our children and handle the things we don’t know how to handle (especially with our four year old? SIGN US UP.)

But anyway…

We’d been waiting for a text that these people might cancel, but since it never came, we knew we needed to do something about the driveway back at home. We just could not believe the snow was still coming down. The forecast said to expect 20 degree temps and heavy wind, but all this snow?

So in between the service and the class, Jamie drove home to shovel our driveway since the snow had come down so heavily.  He got to class about 15 minutes late, but we high-fived and knew that everything was good to go for the 11:30 showing despite a chaotic morning. The house was smelling good, totally clean, the girls were happily in their nursery classes, the driveway was shoveled, Ted was at daycare, and we were in our parenting class.

Holy moly, we did it.

And then at the end of the class, I received a text that the showing didn’t even happen. I scribbled it on a note to Jamie, and he looked at me bug-eyed. Rescheduled for another day.

Cue a quite bummed out Erica. Is one rescheduled showing the end of the world? Absolutely not! Obviously it was a major pest that we had done a ton of running around for nothing, but that’s okay. I think I was more sad because it was just one more set-back on this journey to selling this house, and this process is getting difficult. When you’re selling your house, you usually fit into one of two categories: you either sell your house quickly, making the process somewhat enjoyable and as “easy” as it could be, or you wait and wait while it’s on the market, staring down a set of issues that could domino if you don’t sell by “x” time. Add in selling in the dead of winter and two kiddos to clean up after, and it’s all just kind of no fun when you have showing after showing that don’t yield offers.

This was the first time I felt more pessimistic than optimistic that we will sell this house in time to move into a new house in Alabama in the spring. We’ve been feeling so good that everything would work out after how hard we’ve worked on this house, and though we’re gotten nothing but positive feedback about the house itself, the house just hasn’t been the right fit for buyers for one reason or other. It’s also currently a buyers market as well as a HORRIBLE time of year to sell a house. Literally only five houses went under contract throughout our entire city during the month of January. Yikes.

We did receive some good news a couple weeks ago, and that’s that our inspection report didn’t show any major issues. When your home is 31 years old, THAT’S GOOD! The bad news from a couple weeks ago was that we lost our potential buyers because of some cold feet, which also sadly lost us 10 crucial days on the market.

So here we are, February 6th, really needing to get this house under contract. Not only are we counting on it going under contract before mid-March, but we are banking on closing before Mid-April so that we can close on our Alabama home and not be roomies with my folks forever and ever.

Despite all of my yappin’ in this post, I’m not actually all that stressed about all of this (believe it or not) because I know at the end of the day that the worst case scenario is that our house doesn’t sell in time, we lose the Alabama house, and we live with my parents until things iron out. THAT IS NOT THE END OF THE WORLD. Though we are mega anxious to get into our own home, having that soft place with my parents to land is SO comforting. I can’t imagine if we were going through all of this and moving to a place with no family and friends to potentially crash with. That would be terrifying and a potential major financial set-back.

I know in my heart of hearts that everything is absolutely going to iron out (maybe even as soon as tomorrow because you just never know with real estate!), but sometimes the control freak in me has a hard time when things feel this unknown and out of my control.

So, that’s a little house-selling update. I think I’ve mentioned five or 500 times that I swear we are going to live and die in the home we are buying and never doing these house selling and buying thing again. No sir. We are staying put.

But we all know how the best laid plans go…

PS: If there is one single aspect of this transition that we would have picked to go smoothly, it would have been Jamie’s job. And oh by golly, God blessed us more than we can have ever asked for or dreamed of with his job. So knowing how seriously blessed we were by that opportunity is helping us keep everything in perspective that some things in life come easy and other things are difficult, and that’s just the name of the “life” game. It’s like we heard in our aforementioned parenting class on Sunday: Teach your kids that life is hard and is always going to be hard in one way or another. But hard doesn’t always mean bad. We keep trying to make things easy for our kids and constantly protect them from hard scenarios, and that’s not the way it should be. When things are hard, you learn to work, work, and work some more and do the best you can to overcome every hurdle because they’re going to keep coming. YES.

More: Announcing getting out of the army & finding our dream home in Alabama