Oh! What a week!

 0800 October 13. Mrs J and I are finishing breakfast when the phone rang.  Mrs J answered and it was our realtor, my fingers immediately crossed in the hope he had a bit of potentially good news.  (Yes, Beans, good news is always potential until it actually occurs.  We're not there yet.). But the realtor asked if our Dogs could be gone from the house for about 4 hours without rioting.  I said sure with enough rib bones.  The cat however...

But he then dropped the big one, he was going to be showing the house to 2 different potential buyers.  

OK, then, we'll handle the dogs.  (We just sat them down in the living room and explained how important this was in trying to sell the house.  We also told them how we'd show them parts of town they hadn't peed on yet, so they could mark new territory.  Tails went into full flogging mode at that.  Cat, however, wasn't impressed. ) 

Ah well.  

1200 October 14. The showings went well, very well.  The first showing of the day was the second showing of our house to a couple from  Colorado.  This time the wife came along, that may have made a difference as they told our realtor they'd be making an offer when they got one on their house.  That's definitely good news, but a long way from a signed contract.

Still, better than nothing.

When the realtor told us about the second showing, something had me a tad bit more confident.  The two viewers live about 15 miles south of us in a medium sized city.  He relayed to us that they were not comfortable in the neighborhood they were living in,  too crowded, noisy, close together...Well, none of that is a factor on our 30.9 acres.

Our property

 They said they liked the property and, to me, it just feels like a better fit for them.  They also told our realtor that they were very interested.

We shall see what will be!

0800 15 October. Well, it's a couple of days and things are speeding up.  We did get an offer from the people in the vicinity.  Yes it was a very low ball offer.  We went and visited our realtor about what he thought the house would sell for, his price and mine were almost exactly the same.  So we had him put together a counter offer which still allowed for some negotiation above our high end sale price.

As I mentioned above, we shall see what will be!

0800 16 October. Given the activity going on, we realized we've got to get the move-out side of the move started.  Getting stuff ready for movers is now in progress.  We're also headed over to College Station sometime in the next couple of days for an out and back.  We've got a couple of properties that we're interested in, but the photos are not all that satisfying.  We’d like to do a walk through and see what the truth is in the listing. We also reminded the selling realtor that Mrs J’s travel schedule has a River Cruise tour in Portugal in November and a Disney cruise in December for our family, so scheduling the sale and move will take some planning and mid-January would be the earliest jumping through all the hoops could be accomplished. 

So, progress, but, unfortunately, circumstances changed that moving schedule.

0800 17 October. Things quickly started to roll.  The folks from south of us called this morning  and said yes.  The only drawback (such as it is) is they need to move in in Mid December.  Their Daughter is in a difficult pregnancy and needs to be in one of our guest houses where it's peaceful and quiet.  That's the determining factor on the sale.  I think we're probably gonna have to borrow Santa's sleigh to move our "stuff" to College Station by the 17th of December. 

So, gonna be a "fun" couple of months and Mrs J and I may sleep through the cruises.  But...we are officially under contract for essentially our asking price.

0800 18 October. Now the priority is getting things sorted on what we're taking, what we're donating and what we're junking.   Mrs J is being ruthless.  Sentenced me to cleaning out my workshop.  Talk about cruel and unusual punishment.  If offered the opportunity to criminals to avoid capital punishment by cleaning the workshop, I think they'd just go ahead and end it all.  Unfortunately, that is not an option for me.  

0800 19 October.  Actually once I got started, I made quite a bit of progress. 8 large black trash cans full of "stuff" (swahili for "junk") were taken to the dumpster. All the tools and good stuff I want to keep are in Plastic boxes with snap on lids.  Back wall and work bench back there are pretty well ready to go.  Stuff along the right wall are still needing some dumpster/no dumbster decision making.  But progress is being made. 

 

C'est la vie! Most of the stuff along the right is small and hand tools, so that will be packed into shipping boxes as we're taking it with us.  The packing process has progressed about halfway up the right wall just on the far side of the crumpled Lowes (plastic) bucket.  Still a lot of junk to be thrown out but ... progress.

Update: Right wall has been de-junkified.  Found quite a few tools that I didn't know I had (e.g. I now have 4 contour gauges. I'm sure they'll all come in handy when I gain three more hands.) 

But, we're under contract!  Never imagined that things would change so fast.  Still a lot of hoops to jump, but we're making progress and will be on our way or will be soon. But, it ain't over until it's over, so fingers are crossed (unless I'm carrying out trash, which means they aren't crossed very often).

1600 Oct 19: The Buyer asked if she could bring her daughter and the daughter's husband by and look at the property.  We said OK.  They seemed happy with the property and were satisfied that it would accommodate the daughter's pregnancy requirements.  So...Finally...All happy all round.

What a week! Thank you, Lord, for keeping me calm and sane!  Please continue to help until it's official.

Been a helluva week. If you're still reading this it's my normal Monday publishing and therefore.... 

Peace out y'all!