19 Days

When we moved into our first home 5.5 years ago, it was lovely. It was a great first home for us, but it was always supposed to be a "starter" home. I thought we could comfortably fit one child in this home, but never thought we could have 2! Now we have two bouncing boys. They fit in our house, but I lost my office space, which is okay, since I only work from home part time these days. All these years, Nicholas has had a separate studio space, but he is moving out of that space and starting a new business, so it had become pretty clear that we have outgrown our house. Plus, we always planned to move before Big Bro started school...which is in 1.5 years! I started very casually looking at houses in areas we knew we wanted to live, curious about the prices. I was shocked to find that house prices have increased $80K to $100K in the areas where we want to live in the last year. It seems Austin is the #1 place in Austin to move, and housing prices are just continuing to increase!
We had our Realtor come over to start an initial conversation about selling our house and were shocked about how fast he said our house would sell. He came over the day after Thanksgiving, and we went to visit this house I found that I really liked. I was pretty sure this was the perfect house for us. We walked in, and Nicholas agreed. This house we visited was amazing! It had a 3 car garage, so Nicholas could have a studio. Space for the boys, a playroom, an awesome backyard, a big master bedroom, and a well-designed space. I was pretty sure this was where we were going to live, but Nicholas needed some convincing. We spent some time looking at other houses, but nothing compared, design-wise, value-wise, and the potential future value...so the second week of December we made an offer. After a little negotiation, our offer was accepted, but it was contingent upon us selling our house. We spent the last 19 days of December getting our house ready to put on the market by January 2nd.
The last 19 days of December includes Christmas...something Big Bro was very excited about, and it was Lil' Bro's first Christmas! We managed to fit in a couple Christmas-y events amidst the house prep. In the end, we had 4 sheets of paper filled with To-Do's! Here are some highlights:

• Finish the kitchen remodel (Stay tuned for the "reveal")
• Roof Leak repair. This included having roofers fix the roof, drywall guys replace and re-texture the drywall and putting down new floors. We installed the new floors...stay tuned.
• Packing up half our stuff and putting it in a storage container to "de-clutter" our house.

The "stager" came in the Friday after Christmas to take a look and see what else we needed to do. Of course, it was the day after Christmas...so there were new toys everywhere! In addition to packing up the Christmas decorations, she suggested we paint the upstairs hallway, the boys bathroom, the kitchen and dining room, the stairs walls that were blue and our bathroom a light grey color. We were not expecting to paint that much, so that was  big surprise right after Christmas. She also wanted us to paint the blue door and shutters on the exterior. The blue door and shutters were one of the things I fell in love with on this house, so we left those, but we did paint the interior outside doors a darker grey. 5 days after the stager came, we had to have the house ready for pictures. We did it, thanks to lots of help from family and our Realtor! We still spent 1.5 days after the pictures were taken getting the house "show-ready."

Our house went on the market Friday, January 2nd. We stayed away all day Friday and Saturday so people could come whenever they were available. We stopped accepting offers at 5pm on Saturday and ended up with 5 total offers. Only 3 were realistic offers, but WOW! By midnight on Saturday, we had signed a contract. We are currently in the option period, which ends tomorrow, but everything looks good to go. We will be closing at the end of the month, right before we close on our new house. There is still much to do to prepare to move and coordination of buying/selling homes, but I'm sure that is nothing compared to our last 19 days of December!