Sold

Although we sold the house a few weeks ago, the reality of it is just now sinking in. The dust has started to settle and the sale has been (thankfully) eclipsed by the busy-ness of school and work, and I can talk about it here without losing my mind.

Let me preface this by saying that the housing market in VA is not what it is here in CO. I work with a girl who had 40 people come the day she put her house on the market here. The offers were so competitive and the market was so good (this was a couple of months ago) that she got a sweet, sweet deal.

I have another friend (you know who you are) who recently sold her house to an acquaintance. From what I understand, there were a few conversations with each other, some paperwork with realtors, and the deal was closed.

Our experience was very different.

When we made the decision to move to Denver, it was fairly abrupt. Due to timing of several variables, we had to quickly put the house on the market (to rent) and were "lucky" to get a seemingly stable and responsible family respond right away. Even better, they wanted to rent the house for three years. How great was that?

Fast forward two years (almost exactly a year ago) when we start planning on getting the house ready to rent, and G made a preparatory trip to check out the house. He wanted to make a list of repairs, to get us going on this process, with the intent that we could fix anything that needed it while the renters were still living there. And then we could put the house on the market before the busy summer season. The renters knew he was coming. It turns out that they had two cats and a ferret running free throughout the house, and they had ruined - and I mean ruined down to the house's foundation - the carpet. The house smelled to high heaven and there was a large hole in one of the bedroom walls. It turns out one of the teenagers had been doing flips in the house and his head went through the wall. And they just left the hole there.

Mind you, they were living in these conditions. In our very nice, very pretty, very expensive house. A thousand miles away from us. We did not handle this well. The last year has been hard.

Some pics of just a tiny portion of the damage:

Once we got over the shock of how they were treating our house, we worked with our property management company to recoup money from them, in addition to their security deposit, that would cover new paint and new carpet once they moved out. The house was in such poor condition that the tenants couldn't fight us over it. They knew they had to pay.

And now it was clear that there would be no way to prepare the house and show it while they were still living in it, obviously. Now we knew that we would have to wait until they moved out, in early summer, then schedule the painters and landscapers and carpet people as close to each other as we could (since we would now be paying two mortgages) and get the work done before putting the house on the market. This delay, we knew, would cost us at least a valuable summer month - from listing in June to listing in July.

We thought it was handled. We thought it was under control. We were wrong.

G spent a week in VA early this summer, supervising all the work that was done as soon as the tenants moved out, and taking care of a lot of "small" things himself. It was during this time, in June, that we got all the paperwork ready to list the house. We took care of all the repairs that we noticed, but overall the house was in good shape. We were ready to off load it!

There are not many "look on the bright side" moments of this whole ordeal, but one of them was that the house was only on the market for one week before we got two simultaneous offers. This is a good position to be in, as you can at least have some leverage and a potential bidding war. We accepted an offer from some good people and the actual house selling process began.

And I mean process.

In addition to the buyers scheduling a house inspection, which is a typical part of it all, we also had to request an HOA inspection to be done. So, in addition to the hefty annual dues we already paid our HOA, we had to pay more in order for them to conduct their own inspection and basically approve our house to go on the market. It was at this point that G almost had an aneurysm. During their inspection, they found some wood rot - on the very top trim border, by the roof - on the back of the house (that faced the forest). Until we got this fixed--and it wasn't a cheap fix--we were not cleared to proceed with the sale.

That was rough. But, we started the process to fix it and meanwhile the buyers initiated their inspection.

Their inspection only revealed a few things, but they were costly and time consuming--which is a bad combination. We spent seemingly hours every day on the phone with contractors in Virginia. There was some water damage behind the wall tiles in one of the bathrooms that needed to be fixed. Which required tearing out all the tile, fixing the wall, fixing the drywall, and replacing the tile. Not cheap. There was also some erosion-type activity on one corner of the yard, that had to be inspected by a certified erosion specialist and then had to be fixed by a licensed erosion landscaping company. Not cheap.

Keep in mind, too, that these were projects we had to track every single day. Paperwork, emails, phone calls, consulting with our realtor so he could consult with the buyer's realtor because the buyers should pick out the bathroom tile, since it was about to be their house. They should pick out the new landscaping rocks since it was about to be their house. But, you know, we were footing the bill. And, you know, they could still back out at any time.

Although none of these types of improvements are rare when selling a house, as the weeks went by it began to feel like we were paying to customize the house for the buyers. Every request and question and comment began to grate. And our attitudes, understandably, got worse and worse.

All of July and August sucked. That's all I can say about that. September hasn't been remarkable, but it's starting to look up. :)

All I can say is that the expense was shocking. It was way, way more expensive than we ever dreamed, and although the house sale did turn a profit, all of that "profit" went to pay everyone (and apparently everyone's brother as well) who even had a bit part to play in the house sale. We've never seen so many people come out of the woodwork asking for money for...well, everything.

So, not only were we not making any money, but we weren't breaking even. And we were reminded of it several times a day, constantly with the emails and phone calls and questions and paperwork and more questions.

And then. Then it was discovered that a pipe had burst, unbeknownst to anyone, under the back of the house. It needed to be fixed, which would require drilling through the basement floor and digging under the back of the house, and - you guessed it! - it was not cheap. And of course, no one involved (including two house inspectors, two national plumbing companies, and a home owner's insurance rep) had ever seen or heard of anything like that happening before.

So. The house is sold. We wanted to sell it this summer and we did. We can now get our feet underneath us and plan a vacation for next summer. But we both still have nightmares that we're back in the middle of it. Whenever we get a random call from our realtor or some type of unexpected email, our hearts skip a beat. The truly unfortunate thing is that we loved that house--it was our first house--but it became such a pain and such a financial burden at the end that it is very difficult to think past that. Maybe in the future...but if so, it'll be a LONG time.

And that's that. I'm glad we're down to just one house. :)