We are officially putting our house on the market tomorrow, and we will be going into contract on a new construction home (fingers crossed) in the next few days! This is a crazy, mixed emotion idea for me. We have spent the entire weekend doing little projects around the house in order to get it ready to sell, and hopefully quick. Here is the update on how we got to this point since my last blog post (the one where I had no idea what we were going to do about moving).
We finally decided about a month ago that we definitely wanted to seriously shop and buy a new home sooner rather than later. The prices are still good, but the tide is definitely turning, and the interest rates are lower than they are ever going to be. We had to take advantage of these two points before they were gone. Plus our current home is just feeling smaller and smaller around us.
We have a pretty tight budget we are working with and also a very specific wish list so shopping wasn't easy (champagne taste on a beer budget haha). The hardest part was making the decision about staying in Toms River or moving a little further south in order to get more home for the money. After seeing several homes and weighing the options, moving to the next town south ended up being our best solution.
We have had our eye on one particular neighborhood for about a year now. Our good friends Kelli and Brian (with their son Noah, who is one of Ryan's BFF's) live in the neighborhood, so we had the chance to really check things out. We like it because its a true neighborhood, it is filled with families and young kids, and it is very close to the parkway which makes the move to a new town a little bit easier. Plus living in the same neighborhood as ours friends is a good selling point :) We have looked at 4 homes in this development and seriously considered buying 3 of them... all of which didn't work out for one reason or another. I was just about to give up and move on to new options, when suddenly a lot in that exact neighborhood came on the market through a builder. It seemed a little to good to be true, so we made an appointment right away to meet with the builder, we didn't want to miss out on this house after we missed out on the others.
In short the meeting with the builder was great. They had plans to build a home that literally has 99% of our wish list and it is in our price range (well just a little bit over) and it is on a great piece of property, in the neighborhood we love. I was ready to sign the contract on the spot!
I am still a little bit nervous because a few more pieces need to fall into place before everything goes through, but things are looking really good. We have spent the last 2 weeks getting our mortgage qualifications in order, drawing up the contract, getting an attorney, and preparing our house for a quick sale, like I said. That is one of the biggest stipulations. We need to sell our house by time the builder is ready to start actual construction. The builder is currently in permits, land clearing, utilities stage so it gives us a few months to sell our home while they are taking care of that. Once they are ready, it will be about 4 months until we will be able to close. That's the other slight issue... we will need to find a place to live for a few months between when we sell our house and when we close on the new house. At this point we are taking one step at a time. Each week is a new to-do list and we have our fingers crossed and are saying lots of prayers that the few stipulations will work out so that this actually happens.
Of course selling this house is a little bit (just a little bit) sad. We have our only memories as a married couple and a family in this home. We planned our wedding here, got married while living here, got pregnant here, had Ryan here... this house has been the back drop of all of those big memories. BUT I do know that a newer, little bit bigger home will be the perfect change for our family to grow into and hopefully stay in for a very long time!
I'll keep updating as things are happening, but so far so good! This could be a crazy adventure!
It's really hard to let go of memories, but the best thing about memories is that, you can carry it wherever you go. Even if you will live in a new place, your memories will still be with you. A new place always means a new beginning! Just hope that whoever will buy your house will take care of it like you did.
ReplyDeleteHello, Shan! I know selling your home and acquiring a new one is climb-up-the-hill process. So like you did, homeowners who want to sell their property must do themselves a favor and hire a real estate expert to ease up and speed up the selling process.
ReplyDelete→ Kathleen @ HomeLawyer.ca