Home Sales

This is the first time I've ever sold my home.

Sure, we moved when I was a kid. Each house was my home, and we sold each house. But the sale was all in my parents' hands. I was busy dealing with the trauma and excitement of MOVING. This time, along with MOVING, I'm also selling my home.

When we decided to buy a house, I wasn't fully on board. Everyone said "buying a house is a great investment" and "interest rates are so low, you'd be a fool not to buy now." So we searched. But I told Dave that I was only interested in buying a house if I fell in love with it.

I fell in love.

And 6 years later, I still love my house. It's expanded from the home of a young couple into a home with a dog and two children. It's grown a retaining wall in the front and a brick patio in the back. We've painted every room and placed the perfect curtains and artwork. This is my home and I love it.

And selling my home is so demoralizing. I think I will be like this as a parent, as well. When my daughter isn't invited to the cool kid's birthday party, I'll hurt for her. When people tour my house, and decide not to buy it, I'm sad. This is a beautiful house, I want to tell them. How could you not fall in love with it?

Overwhelmed

There are so many things flying through my head today, that I'm feeling a bit overwhelmed. I think that rather than going for interesting prose, I'll make use of the bullet point feature.

• We're still negotiating the contract on our house. Translation: we still have no contract on our house. We're on the neighborhood house tour this weekend, and sadly, we feel that we need to treat it as an open house. So, lots of cleaning and rearranging. And if we have no contracts by the middle of next week, we're probably dropping our price considerably and listing it with an agent.
• We've begun studying Chinese. We purchased Pimsleur's Conversational Chinese on CD. So we listen, and speak back to the man in the stereo, for half an hour every day. We've conversed twice so far. He asks us to repeat what he says, and to make sure we're getting the exact intonation. Then he asks us to answer his English questions in Chinese. He's really starting to piss me off.
• S-- has stopped napping again, and is quickly reverting back to the little pill she spent her first few months as. And this time, L-- is not so understanding. Awake time is spent comforting a fussy child, and Sleeping time is spent tiptoeing around to not disturb the lightly sleeping child. Needless to say, none of the To Do List for showing the house is getting accomplished during the day.
• I'm beginning to worry that we're going to have to pay if we want to store our furniture. We've got lots of it loaned out to family (thanks, everyone!), but a few select pieces remain unclaimed. And it seems ridiculous to pay $50 or more per month for the right to keep furniture that we paid only a few hundred dollars for to begin with. So we're faced with the option of paying a lot of money to store our goods, our parting with a lot of the goods we paid a lot of money for in the first place.

Whew.

Tardy Excuse

We've just learned an excuse for the tardiness in delivering our relocation package.

The Boss has left the company.

Referenced previously, The Boss runs the office in China and was in charge of putting together Dave's relocation package. The paperwork has been figuratively sitting on his desk for literally 2 months. The interim Boss is an expat, so will hopefully have not only more sympathy for our plight and act relatively quickly, but will also have firsthand knowledge of what is necessary. So my hopes are high that we will actually hear something from Uncle H-- within a reasonable amount of time.

On another note, we are in negotiations with someone over a lease purchase contract for our house. If all goes well, we should not have to worry about this within a week or so.

It seems too good to be true that within a few short weeks we may have both of these issues resolved!

Open House Post-Mortem

A quick note to update you on the open house last weekend.

After two weeks of scrubbing every inch of our house, shipping the kids off to spend days with their grandparents, and boxing up numerous items - both that we use and that we don't - we held our house open for 8 hours of our last weekend. And the results? Six groups came through - 3 on Saturday, and 3 on Sunday. This was feeling very discouraging until the last group on Sunday, who expressed very serious interest. That made it all feel worthwhile - it only takes one, right? They said they would be out of town for the week, so we're yet to be troubled that we haven't heard from them. But if there's no word by the middle of next week, we'll probably start biting our nails.

Please pray that God keeps control of this situation. Our specific prayer is that it sells fast, preferably from the Open House. But we are holding it open again in a few weeks, and willing to rent as well.

Prayer Request - Open House

Attempting to sell our house ourselves, we are holding it open on Saturday and Sunday. Our prayer request is that we will be able to accept an offer after these open houses. We can be patient with a lot, and are willing to be totally flexible with other people's needs. We just don't want to keep our house continually ready for showings. The stress of that with two young ones is something I hope to avoid.

So please pray that the Open House will go well this weekend. That word will spread to the right people, and that we will have a good showing. But also, please pray specifically that God will bring people this weekend who will buy our house, and we won't have to do showings.

Simplify, Schmiplify

We're holding our house Open to possible buyers in a week, so we've been busy scrubbing the floors, making the furniture smell nice, and putting into boxes the things we don't use everyday. Those of you who have been following along for a few months will know that I expressed excitement about the chance to simplify my life. Well, so much for that. Last night, as I boxed up items from the bedrooms, I placed boxes into two piles. On the west side of the hall were the boxes I definitely want to keep. On the east, I piled the boxes of garbage, recycling and donations.

Sadly, there were many more boxes on the west.

Maybe its good that I started with the girls' bedrooms. They are relatively new rooms, and haven't had the years to accumulate stuff piled in corners. The stack of the boxes on the west side of the hall will hopefully serve to inspire me. Maybe as I clean out the closets this afternoon, I'll end up with more boxes on the east.

As far as China updates go, there are none. We've still heard nothing. Soon we'll start making out own decisions - purchasing airfare, arranging accomodations, setting up shipping. Since Uncle H-- is unwilling to provide parameters, I suppose he'll just have to live with what we decide.

Timing

We have heard nothing from Uncle H-- since our return to the states. I posted below what we learned while we were there, but we've still to learn exact dates, flight information (how many of the 4 of us get seats?), shipping information, and so forth. We are back to playing the waiting game and doing our best to be patient - all in God's time. But as we are able, we're starting to make plans. We're finishing up any work on our house to put it on the market within the next few weeks. We're packing in all of the necessary road trips. And if all goes as planned, the end days will go aproximately as follows:

Wed, August 15 - Nail the lids on our shipments and send them packing.

Sunday, August 26 - L--'s birthday / Our going away party with Lynne's familly

Friday, August 31 - The last night in town

Saturday, September 1 - Drive up to Chicago

Monday, September 3 - L--'s birthday / Our going away party with Dave's family

Sunday, September 9 - Fly to Shanghai

Tuesday, September 11 - Arrive in Shanghai

Wednesday, October 10 - Our shipment lands in our new home

Please note that these are just our tentative plans. Pencil it in, but please know that at this point, all dates may be off by up to 2 weeks in either direction. But having these plans helps me to put together the rest of my summer, with or without further word from Uncle H--. Keep an eye on the site - as soon as dates are set, it'll be posted.