House-Selling Saga

The main reason you have heard so little from me this spring is that we as a family have been as stressed as we've ever been while trying to facilitate several major transitions. Since we came home from the Christmas holidays, we spent every spare hour we had doing home improvement projects to prepare our house for sale. We put it on the market on February 20th, but the projects continued well into March. Only now, they were overlapped with the frenetic activity surrounding each "showing".

If you've never sold a house, let me tell you what a horror the "showing" is to a stay-at-home mom... A perfect stranger calls your house (or your cell phone) at any time of the day on any day of the week, and leaves a message something like this "This is James Michaels from Coldwell Banker, and I plan to show your house sometime this afternoon, probably between 1 and 3 pm." Hopefully I hear the message while it is being left, but bathtime, errands, playing outside, and a variety of other normal daily activities often prevented me from realizing it was there until an hour or two before the showing. Regardless, as soon as I am alerted of the showing, I go into crazy-cleaning mode. Caleb often watched TV while I swept the house from one end to the other, putting EVERYTHING away, making the beds, vaccuuming, sweeping, loading the dishwasher, taking trash out, airing out rooms, spot-cleaning bathrooms and on an on. After this hour of frantic cleaning, Caleb and I get in the car and go SOMEWHERE for the two hours or so that someone might come over. More than half the time, the realtor would come outside the time window in the phone message, or decide not to come at all (without the courtesy of a cancellation call). Those were the worst days...when I cleaned and then killed time away from home for hours, and still came home to no business card on the table. YOU'VE GOT TO BE KIDDING...NO ONE EVEN CAME BY!!"

Anyway, with the drag of incessant home improvement projects and the stress of showings, I have not felt very motivated to write...until now! Almost 3 weeks ago, we got our first offer on the house. A couple of days later, we got the second. We negotiated with both offers until one was high enough to accept, and our house went under contract on Thursday, March 27th. This past Friday, the last contingency in the contract expired (contingencies are ways the buyer can back out), so our house is now as good as sold. We took down the For Sale sign yesterday, and we are officially free from the dreaded showings. We prayed for so long and are so so so grateful to our Lord that the house came off the market before Ethan was born, so that we didn't have to keep the house clean with a newborn. God was faithful and it sold just a week before Ethan arrived. We have experienced God's faithfulness in so many areas these past two weeks, and I will share more about that in a future post. For now, adieu :)