We signed the offer and planned for a closing date on October 9. One month away.
We spent evenings and weekends packing and sorting things in the house and shed. We got things ready for inspection and the boys spent one really disgusting weekend clearing out cattails from the lagoon. (I’m sure they’d love to tell you about it).
Every step of the way we’d pray that doors would open if this is what God wanted for us. Every time we thought there would be a roadblock or a delay, God worked out the little details to keep things moving along.
We also prayed for the family buying our home. We loved our neighbors and where we lived. We prayed that the new family would be a good fit and would enjoy raising their family there as much as we had. I was so thankful I got to meet them when they came for the home inspection. I told Kerry that evening “They’re just the people who need to live here”.
The home inspection revealed a couple of things that needed to be fixed and we were worried with a tight timeline they wouldn’t all get done. The electrician was replacing an old breaker-box two days before closing.
Speaking of closing….because the real estate market was absolutely nuts they were having a hard time getting closings to happen in less than 6-8 weeks. In fact, we signed an extension on our contract pushing the closing date out to the 22nd of October. That helped take a little pressure off packing wise. Kerry and I both had taken off the first week of October to pack and move. Thankfully, we didn’t cancel those ‘vacation days’ because 2 days before our original closing date of October 9 our realtor called and said “Are you guys okay to close on the 9th, the bank thinks they can get everything lined up to go?”
What?!? I mean yes…we could be ready and that was always kind of our end goal, but talk about turning up the heat a little.
The challenge for us this time is that we were trying to decide what we needed now and what could go in storage for 6 months until we were in our new home. We were very thankful my mom owns storage units and she had two empty. One unit is our “6 months/New house” unit and the other became our “we’ll need this soon” unit. Since we didn’t yet have possession of our rental until the week we were off we couldn’t move things from one house to the other.
There were lots of moving parts but thankfully, as with most things I had a system for moving. It’s a little time consuming at the front end, but it has paid off big time when I’ve had to send the guys on treasure hunt for something we needed. Plus…I let the little guys help make the labels so we learned colors, shapes and numbers and counted it as school. Woot!
Absolutely great system, Erin.