Moved! Or: “Buy my house on Craigslist”

Update: Offer countered, counter accepted. Everything went relatively smoothly. How nice is that?!

And now, we have the pleasure of having two houses. Ha ha ha. Not a pleasure. We moved out of the old house, into the new one (mostly), and then we had to get our old house ready to sell. Which means any spare time is spent working on the old house, not unpacking at the new. BUT we’ve listed it. Woo hoo!

I’m got my house pics on TinyPic (naturally), in an album: http://tinypic.com/useralbum.php?ua=tQj3BUoTqy17cc0bbG%2FTrA%3D%3D.

I also have it listed on the MLS, on zillow.com, and Craigslist.

The best thing about the Craigslist ad is that I don’t have to upload my photos again. I copied the HTML code for each image from TinyPic, pasted it directly in the ad, and the images display!

October 6, 2008: Final update: Sold! Closed on Oct 3.

Looking at Moving…

So we’re looking at moving; me and my spouse, not TinyPic. And it sure is hard. How do you know you are buying the right location? I know we are buying the right house. We’ve been looking on and off, with different degrees of desire, for the last eight years. You’d think in eight years we could find something, but sadly, we have champagne tastes on a Gruet budget. That’s not all bad. Gruet is a great, dry sparkling wine.

To make a long story, well, probably still long, we wanted to do something on the piece of land we currently own. We have a 2 bed/1 bath house, with an enormous elm tree (on the right).

Check out the house album at: http://tinypic.com/useralbum.php?ua=tQj3BUoTqy17cc0bbG%2FTrA%3D%3D

It’s smaller than most people’s apartments. We wanted to add on to our house, or scrape our house and put up a new house. But the process is daunting. Find a good architect. Like a house that fits on your lot and is big enough that it will sell for what you put into it. Move out for 6 months to a year. Put most of your stuff in storage. Move twice. Hope your builder doesn’t go over budget. You get the idea.

But now that we’ve found a place and put in an offer, we’re second guessing ourselves. Should we wait for a year, save up more money and THEN do something with our house? Will we hate the new location? (It’s only 0.5 mi from our current location). Will we like our neighbors? Is the neighborhood as good as our current one? The house is certainly WAY better. Will the house appreciate at the same rate? It’s all very stressful.

And this is before our offer’s been accepted! Provided it is, there will be the stress of closing, packing, moving, selling our current house (or maybe holding onto it b/c I really wish we were still living on that specific piece of ground, but not in that house). On the bright side, we’ll have a house that’s actually big enough to have guests, and a dog, and our wedding presents upstairs instead of on a shelf in the basement! And no furniture (that could be a plus or minus, depending on how much I like furniture shopping), and a patio, and space for entertaining. After I get used to it, although I’ll think fondly of our old location, maybe I’ll be fond of the new location, too.