Sold!

So last week we took some big steps in our home-moving process: We finally signed our loan documents and... we sold our house.

Yes, we did! Techincally we sold it about 2 weeks ago but till the option was exercised, it wasn't official-official. Now it is, and the transaction should complete in good time for us to move into our new home after renos are done.

This brings us to the end of the whole house-buying-and-selling exercise. Which means no more dealing with property agents for us! Woohoo! Let's just say that some of the agents that I had to deal with didn't make this process easy.

The process of seeing the option through on the sale of our current property, for example, nearly drove me up the wall. The buyer's agent (her lackey, rather, not the actual agent who had originally brought the buyers) was seriously clueless. He'd irked me by saying things that didn't make sense and by being painfully slow while going through the inventory listing of my home. But the last straw was when the buyer queried if, upon taking the option, we could nevertheless sell the house to another buyer. He did nothing to allay their fears but instead explained WRONGLY that it was possible because I didn't sign his silly Offer to Purchase form. His form was intended to pre-date the option and since we were going to issue one, it made no sense to sign it. (This is besides the fact that the form was fundamentally incapable of acceptance cos of the way they had dated it. A mere "technicality", they had tried to insist.) I was super flabbergasted. Fortunately the buyer had a lawyer on call and they managed to get assurance from him of the nature of the option and the deal went ahead.

Sigh. Bygones. Like I said, I'm glad that's over and done with.

Instead, I should look at the positives, and truly, we have much to be thankful to God for as regards the sale, in particular the good price which we managed to get for it and the relative ease of the whole transaction.

We'd first put our house on the market in January, thinking that we needed some lead time before a deal could be closed. We had a viewing on the very Friday we placed the ad and the potential buyer made an offer on the spot -- a pretty good one which, honestly, was the amount we thought we'd be closing at. At the end of 3 days, we had 3 offers, each higher than the last one. We were totally caught off-guard. We contemplated just going ahead a closing a deal, but in the end decided that we were not comfortable doing so without having found a new home. We therefore put the sale on hold, knowing that we might not get as good a price when we subsequently put our home on sale again.

But thanks be to God, of the original 3 offerors, 2 remained interested and 1 was interested enough to improve on their original offer when we decided to kick-start the sale process 2 months later. We hemmed and hawed over it because we were struck with a bit of "Ah!! We're really selling our house!"-panic. Because I really love this home of ours, you know? But common sense prevailed in the end and the deed has been done.

The time for goodbyes will come, and I know I will find it hard to leave. But for now? I'm just super excited.

Renos, here we come!