Life in the Fast Lane

Whew, what a Fall it has been! Hmmmmm, where should I start recapping?

Around the middle of October, J and I were ready to meet with a realtor and get the process going of listing our house to sell. We were given a great reference, and immediately started rolling as soon as possible. We had a long list of little jobs to get done around the house, then the stager turned our house into a model home, and we finally were up and running on MLS on the evening of Friday, Oct. 29. Because it was late on Friday when the listing appeared, we were warned that no showings would probably happen that weekend because realtors would have to log on to their computers to find it. We headed out of town for a wedding on the morning of the 30th, with the house ready to show, just in case.

Since we were sooooo lucky in Houston with selling that house, I was naively optimistic that we'd have the same luck this go around. By the afternoon of the 30th I was pretty bummed that we hadn't gotten a call yet about a showing getting scheduled. So, there we are, trying to juggle two little girls in a silent church with the wedding about to start, when Jason leaps up out of the pew, grabs his phone, and runs outside. I thought it must have been his "the world is ending" phone, but he came back fairly quickly with a peculiar look on his face. And, just as the bride is about to walk down the aisle, he whispers, "We have an offer." So, I sit through the whole ceremony (thank you, Methodists, for the 20-min service!) wondering what the heck he's talking about since we never received a call that anyone wanted to see the house. Well, it turns out that somebody randomly drove by, saw our realtor's phone number on the sign, and called her. And, since she knew that we were out of town, they skipped the whole keeping-the-sellers-informed part of the process and looked at the house anyway.

So, in less than 24 hours of listing the house, we had an offer! We all agreed on the asking price by Sunday, the 31st of October, along with a closing date of November 30th. So we had exactly one month to figure out what in the world we were going to do.

J doesn't report in to the Air Force Base in Dayton until February 4th, so we decided to have our household goods packed up and moved to Ohio, where they will be stored until we get there. And, in the meantime, we're living with Honey and H.

I will skip the part of the story involving very sick children and my first ever experience with military movers. Needless to say, I was stressed. Let's just leave it at that.

So, now with our house sold, we need to figure out where we are going to live in Ohio. The housing market is horrible there, and knowing that we'll be moving again in five or six years, I initially voted for renting. But, it turns out everyone has that idea as well, and there's absolutely nothing I want to live in for the next five minutes, let alone years. J had a course to teach in Dayton for the last week, and we figured he might as well look at houses while he was there. Maybe he'd see something worthwhile and we might actually be able to close on a house in January so that we have a place to land when we arrive for real with a cat and a dog and two little girls in the middle of winter. And, as luck would have it, he found exactly what we were looking for in the neighborhood we wanted. So, as of January 25, 2011, this will be our new home:

We're giving up about 1,000 square feet and a quarter of an acre, but we'll be in the best neighborhood in Dayton. It's their version of Rice Village or Alamo Heights, with these huge houses next to more modest ones. The schools are top-notch and there are parks everywhere. Even though we really don't want to leave San Antonio, I think we've done our best at making lemonade.