Twenty four little hours

This is what I was wearing the day we started negotiations on the sale of our house.*

Yes, folks, we got an offer. Yay!

But it wasn’t nearly high enough to allow us to move. Boo!

The whole time that the house has been on the market, there’s been only one property we were seriously interested in buying. It’s been pretty nerve-wracking, to be honest. We knew the house we wanted could be sold at any time, but after weeks and weeks of non-stop searching, we hadn’t found anything else in our price range that we were even vaguely interested in buying: not even one. Basically, we needed an offer on our house ASAP, and it needed to be high enough to allow us to make an offer on the new one. If the house we wanted was sold BEFORE we got the offer we needed… we wouldn’t be able to sell at all. (Or we’d have to sell without having anywhere to move to, which isn’t really an option for us for lots of boring reasons I won’t get into, because, boring.) Just to make things even more complicated than they were already, the owner of the house we want to buy was also marketing it for rental, which meant that not only was there a chance that someone would come along and buy it while we were waiting to sell ours, someone could also come along and rent it. And, either way, we’d be out of luck.

We started negotiations with a potential buyer on Tuesday.

The seller of the house we’re interested in agreed to rent it to someone the same day.

If any of this is sounding familiar to you, then yes, you’re right: it’s familiar because this is JUST OUR LUCK. In fact, you may remember this exact set of circumstances from such scenarios as “the first house we found was sold on the same day ours went on the market” or “Nigel waited years so he could try to sell his house at exactly the same time as us“. Honestly, I’m not in the least bit surprised by it, because it seems that there’s just no other way for things to happen for us. I’ve been predicting all along that we wouldn’t get an offer on our house until the one we wanted to buy was off the market, and oh hey, look, I WAS RIGHT! Again. I may not have much luck with property, but damn, I’m ON FIRE over here with the predictions, seriously!

All is not quite lost, though. Or not yet, anyway. The seller of Potential House #2 has told us he’d much rather sell it than rent it: it’s still possible for him to pull out of the rental, and he’s given us until Friday to get back to him, after which the rental will go ahead, and we’ll lose the house. OUR potential buyer, meanwhile, is trying to decide between our house and another one, and has also said that she’ll give us her decision by Friday, now known in our house as D-Day. Or, actually, let’s call it OMG-Day, yes?

Basically, then, we have 24 hours to sell this house. If we don’t get the offer we need tomorrow (and honestly, I’m not hopeful), we lose the possibility of the only house we were interested in, and will basically be unable to sell ours at all until we find something else.

So, no pressure then. I mean, it’s not like absolutely everything depends on what happens in the next 24 hours, and we’ll lie awake all night talking endlessly over all of the “what ifs”, and getting up early to sit and stare at the phone, waiting for it to ring. Oh no, wait: that IS what’s happening. And we’re already spending most of our time staring at the phone, willing it to ring, and then feeling sick to our stomachs with nerves/excitement any time it does.

Basically, it’s a bit like being in an episode of 24, only with, you know, houses instead of terrorists. And us instead of Keifer Sutherland. If you could all just imagine the sound of a ticking clock at this point, then a 4-way split screen with Terry and I in one box, the potential buyer in another, our seller in the third and, I dunno, let’s put Rubin in the 4th, just for the hell of it. That’s my life right now. I think we can all be grateful that my Twitter account is still hacked at this point, because I can’t even begin to imagine the hysteria I’d be subjecting everyone to over there.

Any good vibes you have going spare would be really welcome around about now…

(*We took the photos BEFORE the negotiating started, obviously. I mean, I didn’t go, “Oh, we have an offer on the house? Quick, let’s run out and document my outfit!”)