SOLD! Now let's move...

How perfect is it that we close on the Jacksonville house on April 1 and then close on the Apopka house on April 12?  IT IS MORE THAN PERFECT!!!

We are buying our new Jacksonville house was a great price, $35,000 below appraisal.  It is a short sale, which typically takes 3-6 months to complete.  I have a friend who has been waiting 9 months!  They should really call this a long sale!  "Short Sale" means the seller is in a financial dilemma and in order to avoid foreclosure, they ask the bank to intervene by reducing the principle they owe, allowing them to sell for less than they owe - they will be short of funds. Sometimes the bank makes the seller pay them back some of the difference, sometimes not.  It all depends on their financial situation.  Like us, most buyers rarely find out the whole story.

So this darling little house in an established neighborhood (nice mature trees, clean streets, no ratty houses...) went up for sale for the ridiculously low price of $86,000, and this attracted a lot of buyers, including us.  We bid, and there was a bidding war with two other buyers, but we won our little trophy home with $96,000, gave a deposit and signed the contract with the seller to buy the Jax house in early February.  Although our bid was accepted with the sellers, the bank has the power to request more money from us or the sellers.  We would have paid more, but were hoping not to. We were delighted to find out only a month later that the bank had accepted our bid and the paperwork was starting.  We were even more astounded to find out that the closing would be April 1, only two months* from the day we placed the winning bid. Unheard of!

Our Apopka house went onto the market on a Saturday.  We had a lot of lookers (10 appointments in 7 days) and a contract was accepted on day 12 for 97% of our asking price**.  That's a really good offer and we were happy to accept it.

So the buyers could imagine their own stuff in our home, I boxed up most of the "extras" in our house, which we stacked in a storage unit.  I culled a lot of stuff from overflowing closets, but now realize that I don't miss most of the stuff, so when I unpack, I plan to get rid of at least half of what I thought was oh so important.

We close on the Jax house next Monday.  Mark and I will tow a rental trailer filled with the contents of the storage unit on Saturday when we head up to stay with my parents to celebrate Easter and to close on the Jax house the next day.  We will go straight to our new house, unpack the boxes, drop the trailer off at a UHaul place in Jax and then head back to Apopka to face the overwhelming task of moving away from the place we have called home for over 25 years.

How lucky are we that we can move our belongings straight from our current house to our new house without having to deal with storage worries?  We originally thought we'd have to go the POD rental route, but now we can back the big moving van up to the garage, shove everything in, drive it to Jax, back up to the new garage and shove it all out.  Gosh, that sounds so easy!

*Update: Probably because we paid cash for our short sale house - less paperwork for the bank.
**Update: We actually got our entire 100% asking price due to a buyer's agent faux pas on wording in their contract.