Let's see, the last entry here was from just after Father's Day. But those of you who know us are already aware that we've had an incredibly busy summer, because over Father's Day weekend we decided to put our house on the market. Just the weekend before I was riding my bike down Samaritan Avenue here in Ashland when I stumbled on an open house. We weren't even thinking about moving at the time, but I liked the look of the place, so I decided to go inside. It was love at first sight. Cherry hardwood floors, high ceilings, a gorgeous sunroom, and, best of all, lots and lots of space. It's nearly 50 percent larger than our current house, in fact. And the asking price was extremely reasonable.
When I got home I told Monica about it, and told her about the place's biggest negative--it only has one and a half baths (we currently have two full baths). She looked at the photos of the house online at the Coldwell Banker site, but she said that the bathroom situation was a dealbreaker. Okay, no big deal--as I said, we weren't really looking to move.
Two days later Monica informed me that she had a confession to make. She'd been surreptitiously visiting the Coldwell Banker site to look at the house, and now she wanted to see the real thing. So next day I made a phone call, and that very evening we were there. And Monica fell in love with it as well. The following day we left for Pennsylvania, our minds reeling. By the time we had reached Monica's parents' house in Sandy Lake we'd decided to try to sell our house.
The next couple of months were a blur, full of open houses and last-minute showings. Early on there were a few people who seemed really interested but no offers came. We looked at a few other houses, but didn't see anything we liked nearly as much as the place on Samaritan. After about six weeks Monica and I agreed that if the house we wanted sold to someone else, we'd take our current house off the market.
In the end things moved very quickly. While we were in Pittsburgh in mid-August (we celebrated our fifteenth wedding anniversary by going to a Steeler game, but that's a subject for another post) an agent showed our house. It was a Saturday afternoon. On the following Tuesday we got an offer. It was lower than we had hoped for, but still within the reasonable range. We contacted the agent for the people selling the house on Samaritan to see what kind of deal we could make, and I spent much of Wednesday on the phone engaged (via our agents) in a three-way negotiation with our potential buyers and sellers. By 5:00 that afternoon we had a deal, and that evening we signed the paperwork. We're scheduled to close--and move--on September 25.
If you'd told us back in March, when we'd just returned from China with our little girl, that we'd be moving in six months, we would've laughed in your face. But here we go. On the plus side, we have the sort of home I've always dreamed of living in. But it's going to be a bumpy few weeks.
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