A Revolving Door, Offers, and a Sale

When we decided to put our home on the market, we did so with a fair amount of trepidation.  Our location is rural and the road, while paved and well maintained, is steep in a few places.  We knew that this would greatly reduce the pool of potential buyers.  And this did, indeed, prove to be somewhat true.....one guy who came and looked at the place gave us feedback that the road is too steep for his truck.  Ha ha, that did crack us up.  It is steep, but after driving around other neighborhoods, we've discovered it's no steeper than many others in this area.

We were not prepared for the volume of showings we received!  It's high mud season here, so that tends to reduce home buying traffic......but not this year.  We received our first offer after four days on the market (wow).  It was ok, but not acceptable so we soldiered on.  More showings!  A guy from CA who was unable to get up here timely sent his realtor up here to take a video of our place.

On day five a truck pulled into our driveway as many others had done.....yet rather than turn around, they continued to pull up in front of the garage.  I notice it was a nice truck, from CA.  The man got out and took a look around, so I went out on the porch and asked him if he needed any help (G was also home).  They were house hunting and wanted to know if our house was still for sale.  I said yes and invited him and his wife in to look at the place, notifying our realtor at the same time.

They visited with us as much as looking around our place.  They are both older than Gary and I.  They've sold their home...it hasn't closed yet, but loan approved and their inspection passed....so it's pretty much a done deal.  Very nice people from a rural area in N CA looking for a rural WA home.  This was their fourth trip up here...homes were selling before they could drive up here(!). After looking all around, they begged us to sell them our place.  They've a realtor in town and I still wasn't certain how serious they were, so I asked them to get us an official offer through their realtor and back to town they went.  By late that evening we received a full price cash offer from them but they were really wanting to take possession on apr 10 when their sale closed.

Yikes(!). We were scheduled to travel down to CO at the end of March as I had a vending booth at YarnFest.  There was no way I could swing that and be out of a home we've lived in for the past 27 years.  So I was formulating a counteroffer in my head to recoup the lost $$$ I would incur by cancelling the CO trip.  We had to think about this a bit.

Mid day on day six we received an offer from the CA video man (as I had begun to call him).  It was ok, but the older couple's offer was still better.  And while we were waiting for the video offer, the older couple sweetened their offer quite a bit to entice us out by Apr 10.

The offer was sweet enough that we signed, on the spot.  Holy cow.  We did it!