EUREKA!

After five miserable months of trying to sell my townhouse, this glorious time is finally upon me. The buyer had come earlier with an absolutely terrible offer but ultimately decided to accept my counter-offer.

That was Tuesday. My closing date is this coming Friday. I would have posted sooner, but I’ve been a little busy.

So, we had the place inspected yesterday (now I need to have an HVAC guy come out and look at some things @#$&%!) and it was appraised today. All the while the wife and I are packing and shuttling all our worldly possessions to a storage unit one SUV load at a time.

We also went house-hunting yesterday. We did use an agent for that and we found exactly the place we wanted and made an offer last night. After a counter-offer and a counter-counter-offer, we came to terms tonight. Closing on our new house isn’t until 12/30, so we’re going to be moving in with a good friend of mine (and fellow suburban creature) in the meantime.

Here’s a lesson in be careful what you wish for; we spent five excruciatingly long months trying to get to this point. Now that we finally have, life has become incredibly hectic. Here’s how our timeline of crazy is unfolding:

This past Tuesday: Offer accepted
This past Wednesday: Sign contract
This past Thursday: Get my listing agent to sign the contract, get pre-approved for mortgage, get storage unit
This past Friday: Begin packing
Yesterday: Home inspection, packing, find HVAC guy, take stuff to storage, house-hunting, make offer on home
Today: Appraisal, more packing and more trips to the storage unit, try to shanghai friends into helping us move, reject counter-offer on home buy, make another counter-offer, agree to terms
Tomorrow: More packing, get utilities cancelled on current house
Tuesday: HVAC guy, more packing
Wednesday: More packing
Thursday: More packing, have new home inspected
Friday: Close on sale of townhouse, more packing
Saturday: Move out completely by 11 PM, move in with generous friend

Wild! And of course, we still have jobs, pets and the small matter of a ten-month-old baby girl to contend with.

But it looks like I will manage to sell the house myself only a couple of weeks after it was listed online. Proof positive that if you do things right and you’re aggressive with potential buyers, things will work out.

With everything happening this past week and this weekend and knowing what’s coming this week, I’m so wound up that it’s 1 in the morning now and I’m sitting here blogging instead of sleeping. Probably not wise… But who cares? I sold my house! I sold my house!

It’s a great feeling especially after waiting nearly half a year to get it done. I feel like dancing but I won’t because I just don’t do that.

And by the middle of January, we’ll be all settled in to our new house. A fire will be burning, hopefully in the fireplace, the baby will be taking her first steps in the living room, we’ll all be enjoying the spacious four-bedroom floorplan and my beautiful new well-manicured back yard will be peppered with dog excrement.

Life will be good.