and I shouldn’t be. It is just about 3am and I am lying in bed thinking of ways that I can avoid going to sleep. Why is that? I don’t remember drinking anything too caffeinated but then again I had three mugs of tea which does have caffeine…hmmm, might have to rethink that next time.
What do I have to quickly block about? Well, having your house up for sale is challenging! First there are the basic challenges which are having your house in “show” condition frequently by packing away a lot of the personal stuff that detracts buyers and continually cleaning up your “living” mess for others. Then when we do have Open Houses or showings we have to be out of our house from 1 – 4 hours along with our dogs. During this time every single light in the house is turned on so you begin to wonder how much electricity you are wasting. Then, with every day that goes by without an offer or so much as a showing you question why your house isn’t “flying off the shelf”. The end of April will mark 3 months of our house being on the market, which seems like a sizeable chunk of time for me. In that time we have had 10 buyers through including the open houses. I would have thought we’d have had much more traffic than that. Currently we are listed for $304,800 which is lower than the original $314,900 we originally posted. Now, our realtor is suggesting another price drop t $299,900. Although our house is one of the larger ones in the price range, apparently having no garage is a deal breaker for a lot of people. While a garage is a nice bonus, I really don’t see why people “need” them. In terms of storage we have a shed outside as well as an unfinished basement. Most of the houses in our area are about 1000 square feet plus garage. This may or may not include a basement as a lot of the houses are split levels (so the 1000 square feet would be total). Our house being 1500 square feet plus 800 square foot basement…well if you look at the numbers we have much more room! But people/buyers aren’t always logical, often they are emotional. And there seems to be a certain status association with having a garage.
We wanted to sell our house so that we could buy a home in the Edmonton area, where there are plenty more jobs for Tyler in the electrical union. So far, he has been working in Fort Saskatchewan for five months now…and this job is probably wrapping up soon, likely around the end of May. This opens a whole other can of worms for us as if we were to sell our house in May or June, Tyler might not have a job and then we might not qualify for a mortgage on a new home.
With my “faith” being in everything happens for a reason, I can’t help but wonder what reason or lesson we are learning from this process. While I have come to terms with being alone with Dexter 4-5 days a week, I still don’t like that idea for our long term. It’s not far to Dexter & Tyler’s relationship & honestly its not far to our marriage either. If one of us were to die tomorrow or in the near future, I wouldn’t be happy that we’ve spent the last half year living apart instead of being a family full time.
So what’s the solution? If we were to drop our price as advised, is that going to sell our house? Or are we going to have to drop it even more. While we will likely make some good equity off of this sale, the homes in the Edmonton area are more expensive so we’ll either get less house for our money or have to spend more money on a house.
Again, it’s quite the frustrating process! However, like I’ve been saying a lot lately, we have been so fortunate in our lives so far and if this is our biggest problem right now, then we should be thankful for our luck.
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