May 2012 - House Sold!

May 2012

We had set a goal of putting the house on the market the first week of May so we could have an Open House May 6.  Logic was to beat Mother’s Day weekend and the long Victoria Day weekend.   Another home our same model was on the market for an exaggerated price which really helped us.  Mike recommended pricing it fairly, we got a huge amount of traffic (at least 50 groups in 5 days), and by Monday May 7 we were reviewing 3 competing offers.  We achieved our dream scenario with a bidding war on our house and selling over asking price.  In the end we got $21K more than what the overpriced house eventually sold for.  And the winning bid came through the real estate agency my old job-share partner Diane Fujita works for, so both my real estate friends were involved in the transaction!  For my American friends reading this posting, know the Canadian real estate market didn’t crash like the US one a few years ago so we did well.  Mind you, we lived there 13 years and had put money into floors and other upgrades over the years too.

We met the family that bought our house and were so pleased they were the winning bid.  Really excited, 2 teenage boys, and the Mom was already looking forward to decorating the banister at Christmas with garland.  The poor woman was sharing one small bathroom with 3 guys!  We’ll see how they like the 2 teenage girls living next door!

Once the house was sold, we were able to really start pulling stuff out and packing it up.  A big shout-out THANK YOU to Ed Mockler from the cottage who got us some nice sturdy computer boxes for packing.  We were discovering “layers” of stuff and you just had to work through it once people were no longer coming through viewing the house.  Unfortunately until we have the new cottage built and are settled there, I just don’t know exactly what we’ll need or what will be extra.  I’m sure there will be an even bigger purge then.  I felt good that in the end there were a lot of things that were given away to worthy causes rather than just being pitched.  Children’s Aid kids got quite a few things including some furniture, and for a while I was such a regular the guys at the Value Village donation drop-off would recognize my car.  Judy’s church got donations for their annual sale, and her daughter Natalie in university got a couch.  Aunt Marion Schaper volunteers with a new Moms group and they benefitted, and Jaime’s house also decided to do a garage sale as a fundraiser for their Florida trip.  And the infamous antique pump organ which has followed us for 25 years found a home with a church camp.  They were teaching the kids how to refinish furniture and had plans on turning it into a candy counter for the camp store.  I actually interviewed people before I gave it away…  I did keep the foot pedals as a memory – perhaps picture frames? – but it was a big step for me to part with that!

During this time, I would stay at the house and pack until the wee hours.  Ibby was often at the condo trying to get a good night's sleep whenever he could.  As many of you know, Ibby is usually on call for work and often gets paged overnight at all hours.  Since we were thinking end goal and where our mattresses would eventually end up, at this point the only thing available to sleep on at the condo was a 2” mattress on the floor that was pulled out of our sofa bed!  

It was often frustrating for me to be “half-moved”.  It seemed that whatever I needed – like the chequebook, etc  – always seemed to be at another house.  We had a full 10 weeks of overlap between getting possession of the condo and closing on the house.  And because we were downsizing (at least in the short term) so severely, we found we were taking a box over & unpacking it, then another and so on.  We would not have had room to stand if we brought all the boxes at once and then unpacked.