Off With The Old...
We accepted an offer for our old house on Wednesday night. Escrow closes the day after Thanksgiving, if all goes well. Ave Atque Vale.
The good news is that the prospective buyer ('prospective' because nothing is certain until escrow closes) is a woman with two adopted children who absolutely adores our house -- it reminds her of the house she grew up in, and she fell in love with it the moment she walked in the door. We have a letter from her bubbling over about it. She is also a realtor, so she knows houses very well. This is exactly the sort of person we were hoping to find -- someone who will love our beautiful old house and take good care of it. We are not getting as much for it as we had hoped, but we *are* getting more than we asked, so it all works out.
Tonight we are having a party at the old house for our old neighbors, to say goodbye. This also lets us get rid of more food from the overstocked freezer, specifically the food we were storing in our next door neighbor's freezer because we ran out of room in our new one (uprights are smaller than chest freezers). The staging is probably going away today if it has not gone already, so the house will be bare but beautiful nonetheless. And then we wait, and bite our nails to the elbow, and in 42 more days the house will belong to someone else, please the gods and nothing goes wrong.
Lots of things could go wrong, of course. The buyer is selling her current house, so that needs to happen first. If it doesn't sell, we have problems. Or she could change her mind (we had a higher offer who then backed out, so it could happen here too). Or the Hayward Fault could go off and flatten the place. The next 6 weeks are going to be tense, and we will probably bite each other's heads off periodically. Living in a smaller place does tend to exacerbate emotional tensions...
But we are getting unpacked, and having more things done to the new house. The garage door was replaced yesterday (the old one was falling off the hinges), and a tankless water heater will be installed next month. That's expensive but we will save huge amounts on our natural gas bill this winter, which will probably pay for the installation by spring. Mostly we are learning to live together in a MUCH smaller space, a space which provides almost no psychological elbow room at all. Life as a Work In Progress....sigh.