Look closer....
That's right! It says "SOLD" baby!
This has been such a stressful yet amazing experience for our family. You could say that Libby started it all when she talked me into going to an open house on an acreage near St Charles "for fun". The truth was that the process had started back in 2014 when I started looking for a place in the country to call my own again. There were several times when my ex and I looked at properties and he promised to make my dream of having the horses in the back yard again come true. We even went so far as to talk to the bank and realtors. We looked at a LOT of properties and I got my hopes up again and again. When I finally asked him to leave, I thought to myself that that was that. I was giving up on another dream Again.
Enter my knight in shining armor, Tim. When I met Tim I knew I had found another country soul. You can take a boy off the farm, but when his parents own it, his brother runs it, and he milks cows on it; he's going to be back there a lot. But what he didn't have and had never had, was a place of his own in the country. He knew my dream and he admitted it was his dream, but he also thought we may be too old to start over in the country. He asked me once, "do you really want to retire and live in the country?" I may have looked at him like he sprouted horns and a forked tail when I replied, "umm, yeah?" in the "is this a trick question" kind of way. He said he felt the same but just knew that a lot of people move out of the country as they age and here I was begging to do the opposite. And PS - I don't think I'm "too old" for anything and don't plan on being "too old" for a very long time. So we had come to an agreement that it would be "nice" to find a place in the country, but also a realization that it was a lot of money and probably not going to happen any time soon.
Then Libby took me to that open house and she started something stirring again. I began to dream about that place in the country and we began looking at properties. Lots and lots of properties. And I loved some of them. Tim, not so much. He's more a realist, less of a dreamer, and more practical. I had a vision for every place we looked at and could "figure out" how to make it work. Tim didn't want to "figure out" how to make a place work. He was waiting for the right place to come along. I didn't think there was such a thing. So we kept looking. And looking.
And looking was the fun part. I love architecture, looking at properties, seeing how different people creatively come up with solutions and trying to envision what it could look like. The not so fun part was the selling end of it. I blogged about all the work that went into getting our house ready to sell, or even just the picture portion. All of that packing, cleaning and painting led to nothing when months went by without us finding a property to make an offer on. We wouldn't list our house until we found something so there we sat with some of our favorite things packed away and no plan to list. Many of the properties that I thought might work came and went, either sold or taken off the market. We got our hopes up on a couple and missed our chance to make an offer. We wondered and waited and spring never seemed to come.
Then one day our barn owner shared an ad in the local advertiser for an acreage. There was no address, just a price and a satellite view with a phone number. That same day our sister in law sent us the same ad. We decided it was worth a call and Tim made the call. We got an address and an appointment to go view the property. Libby took one look at the address and lost her mind. It was "the" property that she had wanted us to look at the previous fall, only to have it disappear off the market as fast as we found it. She had loved it and was convinced it was perfect for us. I was not so easily convinced but heck - I'd looked at worse. In fact, the standing joke for a while was "who would find the dead animal carcass first" at the the properties we looked at. This would be our first FSBO (for sale by owner) property so off we went.
It was Carter, Tim and I and we were welcomed by a nice older couple who were looking to retire off of their family farm. They had sold off most of the tillable and had the final 10 acres with building site for sale. They left us to go ahead and view their home at our leisure and we stepped into the front entry. I was immediately in love. Looking at Tim, I could tell he loved it as well. We went through the house once and then again so that I could take a video for anyone not with us that wanted to see. Did we love everything about the house? Of course not, but the few things we didn't love were minor details. For the most part, we were all in love. And that was before we saw the buildings. The excitement kept building the more we saw of the property. The first shed made my heart sing. I could envision the indoor arena, stalls, high ties, wash area, hay storage, and so much more. It was huge and in amazing shape. We also saw the little shed that will be my new two room chicken coop and the large refurbished hog shed. Don't wrinkle your nose at hog shed people. This building is cleaner than most people's houses with not even a cobweb to be seen. All the pits have been filled in and this sucker is clean. We toured the property and were told where all the perennials, fruit trees, raspberries, grapes, rhubarb, bushes, trees, you name it are planted. And there are a lot. We saw the gazebo, the fire pit area, the strawberry patch, the garden and the old silo bases converted into patios. We even saw an elevated cat room, complete with a tree limb climbing entrance and clear window for sunbathing. Yeah, you read that right. It seemed like every direction we turned there was something new and fantastic to see.
And here is when reality set in. We couldn't be the only people interested. In fact, they told us when we questioned them that there phone had been ringing off the hook and they had already shown the home a few times. We left and made sure they knew we were interested, but what should we do? We weren't a mile away when we decided we wanted to look again, bring more kids and maybe a parent unit. Tim got his dad to agree to come along and we scheduled another visit for the following day. This time Libby finally got to come with and as expected, she fell in love. When we got home later, Tim called the couple to tell them that we would like to make an offer. They told us that because they had so much interest they were going to do more of a sealed bid approach after they did an inspection and got the results back. Our hopes were kind of dashed but we put together our bid and prayed. A week later we were asked to stop by the house and through the course of a 2 1/2 hour visit where we talked about a little bit of everything from rhubarb pie to growing up on a farm to houses, we made an offer and bought a house.
Next came the super fun "keeping your house spotless for weeks on end" part of listing our house. We had lot of times when we were temporarily displaced, 12 - 14 times I think and an open house. Pixie grew to love seeing the Scentsy warmers get turned on and the leash come out. She knew she was going for a ride somewhere whenever that happened. And she loved going places, especially track meets where everyone always wanted to pet the cute little dog. Weeks went by without an offer and we started to get nervous. We had a deadline to sell our house by before our purchase agreement on the acreage would have voided. That deadline loomed over our heads and seemed to rush ever closer. We did a few more updates to the house, including my dad repairing, replacing and repainting the entry doors and Tim and I removing the worst stuck on wallpaper I have ever seen in our dining room and kitchen. The open house and the updates were apparently the trick though. After the open house we had several offers and we settled on the one we thought would work best for our family. Then it all became pretty real.
We are currently in the paperwork overload portion of the buying and selling your house process. Moving day is less than a month away and, well, we have a lot of packing to do. But that's a fun part of the process too. Downsizing, sorting and even better - UNPACKING! Waiting to hear on our official moving day but until then, we sold the house! Let the real fun begin.
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