Juggling

There are so many balls up in the air in our lives right now. It’ll be interesting to see where they all land when this is said and done.

First off, I need to selfishly request good thoughts and prayers. I’ll back up a second and say that we re-listed our house with a new realtor on Friday. Yesterday, we got a call from him saying that we had a showing scheduled for 10:30 this morning. It was encouraging, sure, but we’ve had our fair share of showings, and none have ever resulted anything, so we kept realistic expectations.

I left work and got Tessa out of the house, then drove down the street a little bit and just sat in the car with my phone while I waited for the showing to be over. I saw the realtor and the woman go in, then come back out 20 minutes later. Our realtor soon called me (before I even got back into the house) to tell me that he had received a call from the buyer’s realtor, and while the place showed beautifully and it was “one of the best we’ve seen,” she is just starting her search and not ready to buy yet.

Everything we’ve heard before. What a drag.

Around 5:00 p.m., though, I got another call from our realtor. I thought maybe it would be for another showing, but to my surprise, he said that the woman from this morning wants to come back tomorrow with her adult daughter. He said he was told we are in the “top two,” and she just wants her daughter’s opinion on each of them. We also found out she is a noncontingent buyer.

Talk about a turn of events! I asked our realtor what he thought had changed in the six hours since we had last heard from her, and he said that he assumed they had been to see other comparable properties and saw that most of them in this price range are in crap shape, so it made her realize that perhaps she should jump on the ones that are great. Hmm. I guess we’ll see.

Now, we’re anxious to pull out all of the stops to convince this lady that OUR property is the one she wants! How amazing would it be, after more than six months of this crap, to sell just days before closing on our new house? I’m not counting on it, of course, but it’s hard not to get our hopes up a little. This is our first repeat appointment!

So, that’s where the thoughts and prayers come in. Please cross all appropriate appendages for us that this is what we’ve been waiting for? It would be much appreciated!

In the meantime, we’re also waiting on an application from a potential tenant that we met with on Saturday morning. She LOVES the place and really wants it, but we’ve been taking our time working with her because we’re trying to buy ourselves some more time to sell. I told her to take her time with the application–she’s a great possibility (assuming her credit comes back OK), but we’d still love to sell, of course. A *third* possibility right now–we have some friends who are interested in possibly renting from us as well. It’s a long story, but they actually responded to our Craigslist ad, not knowing it was us. How funny is that?

Anyway, it’s great to have activity around our place, that’s for sure. We’re hoping that SOMETHING positive comes from all of this. While the interest in it is comforting, it’s still unsettling to not yet know how this is all going to end.

Shifting gears to our new house… We found out on Friday that we are officially cleared to close. This morning, when I spoke to our attorney, we scheduled closing for Wednesday, which had been the plan all along. A few hours later, however, I got another call saying that the sellers aren’t able to close on their new place until Thursday, and won’t be able to move out–so WE can’t close until Thursday now, either. Not entirely unusual, I’m told, but damn, this sucks. We’re not convinced that they’re going to be able to be out on Thursday, either–even if we *do* close! Obviously, that’s all up in the air right now. We won’t really know until later this week, I guess. I took a half day off from work on Friday to spend the afternoon painting, and I’m going to pissed if I can’t even get in there!

Between the attorney, realtors, and insurance people, I spent probably 2+ hours on the phone today. Ugh! The good news is that after three different quotes, we ended up saving more than 50% off of the original homeowner’s insurance quote we received. It certainly paid to call around!

That is the latest around these parts. Not sure when we’re going to be able to go into our new house. Not sure if we’ll be signing a lease with a tenant, or working with an offer. But we sure do hope for the latter. Keep us in your thoughts tomorrow, and we’ll update when we can. It’s a start to another crazy week; how is it only Monday??