Selling the House
One of the biggest decisions we had to make was whether we should sell our house or rent it out. We had lived in our house for almost 28 years. We no longer had a mortgage. We liked to garden and had small, but well landscaped, front and back yards. In fact, people were wondering why we were giving this all up. Why didn’t we just stay and finally enjoy our house and yards?! Life is not logical sometimes and we were feeling the call to adventure.
After much deliberation, we settled on selling the house. But, it wasn’t just selling the house. It was also selling or giving away all of our furniture. If you have ever contemplated what this means, take a look around your home and imagine having to get rid of everything. It is mind-boggling and overwhelming, to say the least.
We started with selling some of the furniture around Black Friday (the day after Thanksgiving in 2015). A series of indoor moving sales, craigslist, eBay, 14 Facebook buy and sell sites, etc. Slowly, but slowly, we cleared out quite a bit of furniture and other items. At times is was frustrating dealing with no-shows and people who haggle you to get the price to something that is really unreasonable, but you don’t have a choice. It has to go and they know it! This continued for months on end until all of it was gone by the end of June 2016.
In the meantime, by April 2016, we had cleared out enough to list the house on the market. I went from being employed in a full-time job to immediately working full time cleaning the house and making it presentable in one weeks time. It’s a good thing Larry was a substitute teacher as he had to take time off as it was too huge of a task for one person. What a whirlwind of activity that followed.
The house was listed the second week of April on a Tuesday. By Thursday evening, the house was being shown to potential buyers. By Sunday night, we had four offers, all higher than our asking price! We were fortunate to live in an area that was so desirable to new home buyers. It was a sellers market.
One of the fun things we did while we were waiting for the offers to come in was to go down memory lane and take a photo of each of the houses we lived in while living in Madison. Larry was born in Madison in 1960 and I moved here in 1980. We met when we lived next door to each other on East Johnson Street in 1981.
We accepted the offer made by Laura and Jake Schlachter. Soon afterwards, I invited them over for dinner and we had a wonderful time getting to know each other. Next was the closing on the house, which wouldn’t be until mid-May 2016. Part of their offer was letting us stay living in the house rent-free until the end of June. This would allow us time to sell or give away the rest of our furniture and get our boxes ready to be loaded into the crate.
