The Other House

Well, it is official--we have sold the other house!

We began this process two and a half years ago. Back then we thought we were being so smart. We put our house on the market right after we started the building process for our new house. We had months and assumed that the house would sell without problems. We even arranged for another place to stay if it sold very quickly. At that time the market was high and homes were selling rapidly.

Things did progress quite quickly. About two weeks after we listed we had an offer. We accepted and the process began. However, a few weeks into it, the buyer backed out due to financial problems. We were disappointed but not overly worried because we had just had another person tell us that if the buyer dropped out for any reason he wanted to buy the house. So, we called him and within a day or two we were back under contract for the full asking price. Unfortunatly, we again ran into problems and the buyer backed out. We were sad to be starting over again, but glad to not be working with those people. But, within another week, we were under contract again. This time things seemed to be good. We worried a little because of our past history but we made it to our closing date. However, the bank was not ready with the financial stuff so they asked if we could wait until Monday. We said yes, and then had a decision to make. We had arranged to move that weekend and since we were assured that things would go through on Monday we decided to go ahead and move out. That was our biggest mistake. Monday came and the buyer saw the loan numbers and realized the interest he would be paying was a lot more than he wanted to (don't ask me how we got this far without him knowing that) and he pulled out. We did keep his earnest money but that didn't do much to make us feel better.

So, now we had moved out of the house and we were going to have to start over. Plus, by this time our new house was getting closer and closer to being done. We didn't know what we were going to do. We finally decided to do a lease-to-own arrangement with a man whose brother lived across the street. We really didn't want to go that route but our options were limited. By this time the market was beginning to crash.

The lease-to-own arrangement worked smoothly for 6-7 months and then he decided that he couldn't afford it anymore and he walked away still oweing us money. That was incredibly frustrating.

At this point, we decided that with the market the way it was and not really being able to afford two mortgages our best option would be to rent it for awhile and then decide what to do. Luckily rentals were in high demand (probably because no one could afford to buy houses) and we quickly found a cute family who rented without problems for a year.

When their lease was up they moved out and we decided to bite the bullet and put it on the market again. We figured it would be on the market for at least 6 months before anything happened and we would be asking quite a bit less than we had before but it was just time to be rid of it. The stress and debt hanging over us was too much.

So, we found a realtor and listed it again. When we listed it the first time we were having 10 - 15 people walk through a week. This time, we only had two people go through the house total. The miracle is that one of those two people put an offer on the house and bought it. It had only been on the market about two or three weeks.

Jeremy and I worried the whole time the house was under contract. We kept expecting them to back out at any time. We are still in disbelief that things went through and we no longer own two houses.

Right before closing we walked through our house again. It was a good house. We had so many good memories there. Three of our four children were born while we lived there. I was a little sad to see it go, but mostly I am just grateful that it is all over.