Like I Have Time For This?

So, we finally sold our house in Colorado.

Closing was today. By 12:30 eastern time, it was all done.

I purposely didn’t blog about what was happening with our house, mostly because it was too depressing, and also because I kept this blog to mostly Get Away from that whole nightmare and whistle in the dark a bit.

And now that it’s all over with, I can tell you that the past six months have basically been a stint in financial hell that I wouldn’t wish on anyone. We’ve been paying rent here and mortgage in Colorado, plus a second mortgage, plus utilities and lawn care and maintenance, and you get the picture. It’s never taken us more than two months to sell a house, but the real estate market has changed significantly I guess, and it’s a buyer’s market all the way in Colorado right now.

More than half the houses in my old neighborhood are up for sale and still the developers continue to build new houses, and the new cool thing to do in Colorado apparently is to give a homeseller a ridiculously low offer on their house and when we counter offer with something REASONABLE, when we say in fact, hey I’m not gonna let you walk all over me, then the buyer says, oh really? well, screw you then. I’m gonna go buy one of those brand new houses. The developers say they’ll give me a great deal on a house just like yours.

This happened to us twice, and the second time it happened we’d had someone waiting in the wings who wanted to rent our house and wanted to rent it for at least two years. And we told that prospective renter that we needed to see about selling it first, and by the time we’d gone through the whole shitty-first-offer-reasonable-counter-offer-then-watch-the greedy-bastards-walk-away rigamarole, the renter had found something else and we were back to square one.

After that weekend, I sat down and had myself a good, long cry, and we began to investigate seriously moving back to Colorado, because we just simply could no longer afford to pay for two houses in two different states. The money was running out. RegularDad was working at least 2 weekends a month to pay for all of it, and my guilt at not getting a job because I’m homeschooling began to creep in no matter how many times he said not to worry about it.

We also considered lowering our price again, but we were already so far below market price that it would have been awful to have to do that. But we considered it. And then, the day before we were gonna lower our price again, we got another offer. And this one was REASONABLE and we accepted it without even a counter offer.

And every single day I waited for the deal to fall through. But it didn’t. And now it’s all over with.

I’m still having trouble believing it. That we no longer have this awful financial weight hanging over us. But it’s apparently true.

Of course, we’ve got some financial regrouping to do. It’ll take a while to make back all that extra savings we’ve shelled out this year to pay for everything. So, we’ve decided to stay here in this little rented country house instead of buying something expensive. We’re gonna try to get all our debt paid off before we buy something again. Real estate on the east coast is much more expensive anyway.

But since we’d finally sold the house, I told RegularDad that we needed to make a long-awaited purchase. It arrived yesterday, and the kids couldn’t be happier:

After they played on it for a while in the heat, I made them come inside to cool down. As they were walking in the door, my 4-year-old said: You know what Mom? This house is all right.

I couldn’t agree more.

So, after 8 long months, I can finally say that we moved back east and feel like it’s really true. And now that I’m not wandering around the house with this constant pressure, this constant litany of oh shit, oh shit, oh SHIT what are we gonna do? running through my head, maybe I’ll be able to write some poetry again. Or at least finish unpacking.

But hey — at least I didn’t start smoking again, right?