Long story short: Yesterday was not a good day, but we are going to be okay.
Long story long: If I were to write this post a few hours earlier, it might have sounded very different. Very angry. Our buyers (who I have since purged the blog of) had another excuse why their money wasn’t in our bank account yet with another date that we could expect it and we cut them off and decided to move on. After all, today was the last day our contract for our new house was valid–and we already had them extend the contract once. We were already losing the house, we didn’t want to waste any more time with them. It’s pretty ironic that we passed on a few other offers to take their cash offer because it was the most solid, and yes, we would absolutely do things differently in hindsight. But as they say, hindsight is 20/20. We updated this post to say that we probably would have got an attorney–maybe the attorney would have been able to add a claus saying that there would be X amount of dollars due each day the funds aren’t in place? People make mistakes–we do. And as much as I wish that things were so happy-go-lucky all the time, and our blog was perky, that’s not real life. And at the beginning of this process, we promised to take you along for the whole ride. So here we are now. We were naive and probably stupid for trusting someone so blindly and we may end up having to get an attorney anyway to finish dealing with that, who knows.
After we got the news that there would be no close (again!) today, things didn’t go well. We lost a lot of money among other things. A lot of other things. We could barely wrap our heads around everything that needed to happen. This was the worst case scenario. We had to find a new buyer for our house. We needed to make a trip to Utah and prep the house again, since we haven’t been there in 3 weeks. We had to move our stuff out of our new dream house and find a place to store it. And find a cheap apartment to rent until we found another house. And that really cheap apartment needed to take very large dogs. And all the utilities that are scheduled to go in our name needed to be reversed. Things were not okay. We were not okay.
We called our realtor to see what our options were. Could we get another extension? The process has been dragged out for so long, why would they give us another extension? There was a lot of discouragement, buckets of tears, and an endless sea of unknowns. After I recovered from a sob-induced migraine, we had some decisions to make. Where will we stay? We can’t keep living off the charity of family. When will we get our stuff out and do we need to get a truck? Where will we put our stuff? How will we afford rent and a mortgage? How are we gonna get the word out about our home so we can find a new buyer?
Then, things started happening. Our sellers agreed to let us rent the new home until we sell ours, while keeping our contract. Out of the blue, Chris received an email offering him some extra contract work that will help us afford the extra payment. Just through word of mouth we had two showings last night. Some may call these coincidences, but for us they were nothing short of miracles. Within the space of 30 minutes, after an entire day of stress and worry, everything was okay. We were okay.
So that’s where we’re at. We’ll be renting the home until we’re able to sell our house again and buy it, which means we can’t start on projects as soon as we were thinking. But we’re just grateful we haven’t lost the house, and with Chris’s extra work, we won’t be in the poor house. These low points of this moving process are very real-life, and honestly, that’s why we chose to share the whole experience with you in the first place. It would be unfair to not share the bumps, as humiliating as they are for us.
We’ll be sleeping in our new house tonight, everybody! #slowclap
Slowclap at the end of the post takes the cake. Sorry this is happening to you. Thanks for being real.
I’m so sorry you guys have had to go through all this. But what blessings you’ve gotten! Hope things start/continue looking brighter!
I’m a new reader, and this is my first time to comment.
We’ve had a house for sale for a year-it’s very rural, so we knew it would take a while to sell-and have had TWO buyers back out after gushing about how much they love the place, etc etc. It’s never really a DONE deal until money changes hands at closing. Fingers crossed we sell before the winter hits( we are in OR)
We also have sold FSBO with no hitches in other states ( NY and TX), w/o lawyers.
I am curious though-if you are renting from YOUR sellers, why didn’t you guys do that with your buyers-let them rent until the funds come through?
Hope it all works out soon. Remember, “If it’s not okay, then it’s not the end!”
I love that! As for why we didn’t rent to our buyers, they are actually already renting a house–very close to the home and were waiting for a purchase opportunity to come on the market in our cul-de-sac so they weren’t interested in renting it.
oh, I’m so glad that you haven’t lost the new house! And I am so glad to hear that things are not totally bad, and that you have had some more showings! He works in mysterious ways, I think…it’s hard while you’re in the middle of things to see that there might be a light at the end of the tunnel…
Yay-ness for the good hearts of your sellers! And big yay-ness for miracles! Hx