our new blue house

Boy, it sure has been awhile. Does anyone actually read this blog? I'm not a fan of Facebook so here we are.

We have been quite busy. In the fall we decided that we want to sell our house and move out of West Seattle. We once loved West Seattle. We've lived here for 12 years now and bought our first two homes here. But things have changed so much I hardly recognize the area anymore. We thought and thought and decided to move to the suburbs and we have settled on the Issaquah/Sammamish area. They have really good schools and we could move into a 3 or 4 bedroom home with more than one bathroom! Imagine that?! The house we're in now is cute and there is definitely space to grow a bit (by adding a bathroom and bedroom in the basement) but it's not something we want to take on.

Anyway, fast forward to Thursday, April 24. Our house went on the market in the afternoon but we asked for no showings until Friday morning. We were finishing up cleaning and packing up so we could head out of town for the weekend. Shortly after listing I had a man knocking on the door begging to see the house before Friday morning. He had an agent and said it's his "dream neighborhood" but he was going out of town and couldn't see it over the weekend. Finally, I let him in and had a feeling he liked it. Sure enough, a short time later our agent wrote to say that he heard from this guy's agent and he wanted to make an offer right away. At that point I knew it was going to be crazy. We said that we couldn't look at it that night and he'd have to wait a few days. In the end, we had 9 offers and got $65,000 over our asking price!! Five people did pre-inspections. It's an insane market up here.

We accepted an offer that allowed us to stay an extra 2 months past our closing date. We have already closed (May 28) and don't have to be out until July 31. BUT in this market we are about out of time to find a new house. Recently we finally found one we all loved. They had an offer review date (they set these dates and then collect a bunch of offers) so we were going to pre-inspect on Monday because the offer review date was Tuesday and they accepted an offer on Sunday instead of waiting. It was devastating to us all. It's one thing to lose in a bidding war but we never even had the opportunity to try. So with a typical 30 day closing period we are almost out of time to find a house. That means we'd have to be under contract by June 30 or so at the latest. Dave is ready to start looking at rentals but I really hope we don't have to do that. Needless to say we are a bit stressed over here.

I'm going to sign off for now. I'm attaching the link to our house. We spent months getting the house ready, rented a storage unit, worked on the yard, etc.. Enjoy!

http://www.redfin.com/WA/Seattle/5906-44th-Ave-SW-98136/home/152447