When second place turns out to be a good thing

Do you remember this post from last spring? If you follow me on Instagram or Facebook, you might have seen the big news: We bought a new house and moved in at the end of July!

All of the wrestling from the past year is finally over. The “what-if?” mindset is gone.

(Now if we can just get the old house sold… hopefully the painting and cleaning projects will be finished next weekend…)

Want to hear the crazy story?

Five days after I wrote this post, we went to an open house and FELL IN LOVE. Perfect size, perfect location. Beautiful fireplace, open floor plan, a garden and space to play and roam. Afterward we sat down with my aunt (our realtor) and wrote up an offer. For $15k over the asking price.

As busy as the open house was, we should have been more prepared. That same night we got a phone call that our offer had come in second place.

We were devastated. For weeks my husband didn’t even want to look online at was else was being listed. We questioned ourselves over and over if this was really something we were supposed to be pursuing at this point in our lives.

Summer break came, the “perfect” house went from pending to sold, and we hesitantly started looking again. We went to a handful of showings, but each one had something that wasn’t quite the right fit. It was so hard to look at them without comparing them to the “perfect” house.

The second-to-last week of June, I was sitting in the sun with my sister-in-law at our family’s lakehouse, scrolling Zillow as the kids played in the water. I came across a house that said it had been listed only two hours earlier. I looked at the details and the pictures, showed it to her, showed it to my husband, and said “I think we should check this one out.”

Five minutes later I had an email in my inbox from my aunt, with a link to the same house, and a subject line of “Won’t you be my neighbor?”

It was three houses down the road from her.

She said at that price, in that location, we needed to move quickly if we had any interest. So we set up a showing for the next afternoon, grateful once again to our last-minute-babysitter options.

We walked into the house, and the first thing I noticed was the fireplace and built-in bookshelves. *swooooon* The second thing I noticed was the family picture hanging on the opposite wall.

I knew this family. We had attended MOPS together.

We did the usual walk-through, attempting to picture our kids as teenagers in this place. We stood outside being nit-picky and talking details. Then we drove three houses up the road to write up an offer with my aunt.

Our offer was accepted that night.

Thus began four weeks of a whirlwind of paperwork, inspections, appraisal, and the start of packing! It had been 10 years since we had moved, and we had gained 3 kids since then. Thankfully we had purged quite a bit when we finished our basement three years ago, and we live pretty minimalistic already.

Finally our closing day arrived, all went well, and we prepared to move in two weeks. The next day I got a message from my MOPS friend, saying they had just loaded the moving truck and would be fully out in the next day or two.

They were anxious to get into their new house too. 😉

We closed on a Thursday, got the keys on Saturday, brought the first load of boxes over Saturday night — showed the girls the house for the first time! — and recruited friends and family to move our furniture on Monday.

It was so exhausting, but so exciting.

Since then we’ve taken a van-load of things from the old house to the new each time we were in the area, or had a free evening or weekend (they’re about 15 minutes apart). And we’re finally finishing our list of projects at the old house to make it pretty and sellable. Soon…

Honestly the whole process could not have gone smoother (other than still owning two houses, but that’s on us for not kicking into high gear before school started…). This house really is our “perfect” house. It’s in the perfect location, half-way between school and church, and the perfect size (I’ll write more about that soon). If we had ended up with the previous “perfect” house, our mortgage would have been higher (not good on a tight Christian-school-teacher-salary).

The last 3 months have been a whirlwind, and it’s not completely over yet, but I feel more content with my home than I have in the last few years.

And I can’t wait to hang stockings over a fireplace this Christmas. 😀

 

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