Waiting to Exhale

An update on the housing situation for interested readers…

Tomorrow morning we close on the new house we purchased last month.  Our excitement is in-check at the moment because we don’t get the keys until Friday and we still haven’t gotten a closing date on the old house.  I suspect once we open the front door and it’s all ours we will finally give ourselves permission to go nuts.

Since we did things backwards (bought first, sold after) I think we have had trouble giving ourselves permission to really get excited about things. And that isn’t like us. My wife and I are both the kind of people who want to take out full-page ads in the newspaper when we are excited about something.  This house is pretty-darn close to a ‘dream house’ for us and so the restraint we are trying to show is tough. I don’t know how my wife feels but it is killing  me. For some reason I am dying to start taking all our artwork off the walls and get it ready to move. I don’t know why but I think that will make me feel like we are moving forward. But we wait…

For those un-iniated the process of selling a home is to get an offer, agree on a sale price, have the house inspected, buyers submit a repair request based on the inspection, agree on the terms of the repair request, have the house appraised by buyer’s lender to make sure it’s worth what they are paying for it and then wait for buyer’s loan to be approved and to receive a closing date.  Because the housing market is so weird right now we are terified of the deal falling through at some point. The potential problem there (other than the house going back on the market is that the house would now be empty, thus making it harder to get the price we want because empty houses signal desperation. So that’s why we have been so slow to get the ball rolling on moving.

I’ve decided though that I can’t take the pressure any longer. The house has been appraised. We’ll get that feedback in a day or two. There’s not going to be anymore people wandering in to tell us if it’s worth what we say it is. We can’t keep living in limbo. We’ll all go insane. So tonight I’m taking down the artwork and damn the consequences. The realtor says we’re in the home stretch and we can finally exhale and so that’s what I am going to do.