The broker’s open house for our sticks and bricks house just wrapped up. In total 14 agents came through so hopefully that will pick up interest in the house. They all loved it, especially our huge garage workshop. The right person has yet to tour it but I know they will soon! 
It’s been a whirlwind the last few days, making it difficult to focus on things I’d like to write about. A huge mistake was made by me when I decided to check out options for what we will buy when this house sells. We’ve toyed with just finding a lot to park our RV on when we are in town, or buying vacant land to either put a mobile home, modular home or build something to rent out, or buying something already in place to rent out. All of the above have to have enough land for us to park our RV on when we are in town.
Our agent, Jamie, took me all over the place last week looking at vacant land. Since mobile and modular homes are the quickest to plant on a lot that was my first option. The land I liked best won’t allow mobile or modular homes.
Remember the saying “Don’t put the cart before the horse”? Well I must have not have listened when they were teaching this one. Maybe if they had said “Don’t look for a house with money you don’t have!” I’d have caught on before now.
Roy is less inclined to want a mobile or modular home but wanted a small permanent house so I started looking at land with a house. Right away I found the perfect one, took a ride out to Tickfaw to check it out and was so excited. Sure it needed an outside air conditioning unit, was in desperate need of a pressure washing and yes I did fall through the rear porch floor twice but other than that it was perfect. Those little details were not the problem. We’ve gotten use to looking past all that when looking for a house due to our two years spent flipping houses. The price was ridiculously low and we could do everything it needed. Even with the things we’d need to buy it would fall easily in the amount of profit we hope to have from the house selling. I thought we’d make an offer predicated on us selling the house. After calling our agent to ask her to make an appointment for us to go inside I just knew we were on our way.
Turns out it is a HUD repossessed house, so there went our idea of making an offer contingent on us selling our house. They don’t do it that way. They accept only bids made through an authorized agent, accompanied by a letter of pre-qualification from a lender (or proof that you have enough cash to cover the sale) and several other documents. At the time we learned this it was after banks closed on Saturday and the bidding deadline was Sunday night midnight. The fact that we also learned it didn’t have any appliances and was missing some light fixtures wasn’t really a problem because we could just adjust our offer/bid by an appropriate amount to cover that. Of course we couldn’t meet the deadline without a letter from our bank and the bank wasn’t even open.
However, we held out some hope that the bank that was in possession of the house wouldn’t accept any of the bids that were submitted because they were too low or whatever reason. It’s an odd process when the bank is involved, not straightforward like dealing with a home owner and an agent. Roy went to see the house and fell in love with it just like I did, it was perfect and had everything we wanted. His excitement added to mine and we were hanging on to hope of the bids not being accepted. If this was God’s will for us, it would all work out for our good.
Several things happened on Monday that gave us some hope that the deadline had been extended. If we could get all our stuff together quickly we could still be in the mix. We could not get it together soon enough and then found out near the end of the day that the bank was negotiating with one of the original bidders. If they work it out with them or one of the other bidders then the house is off the market.
This turned into a very draining experience and we’ve made the decision to stop looking until we have money in hand. I thought it was wise to look and get a good idea of what is out there. That probably would have been okay had we not run into the perfect one only to find out we couldn’t get it.
So we’ll sit put in our sticks and bricks side yard waiting for it to sell.
I don’t want it to take us too long once the house sells before we can start our journey out west. But I learned through this not to jump two steps ahead of having completed the first step. You get tripped up and boy did we! God knows what’s best for us and this just wasn’t it.
Ya’ll come back now ya’ hear!
BECAUSE HE LIVES 