Big News for us… Sold the House!!!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

We temporarily interrupt this blog about the Florida Keys and RV’ing to bring to you the exciting news of “WE SOLD OUR HOUSE”!

Yes, it is true, after over a year on the market and two price reductions we finally sold our house. This vacant house has been costing us between $400 to $500 per month… Do you know how much fun we could be having with an extra 400-500 bucks!!! Of course you do!

We mention this for all of you who worry about selling your home to let each of you know it will eventually sell. We set our initial price high on the house since we listed it 8 months before we planned to retire, but in our budget we had a lower number for what we expected to sell it for. We fell just short of what I expected to get for it.

Our biggest worry in selling our home was that our market and local economy is driven by the 45,000 student Texas A&M University. So if we hadn’t sold our home by the end of July we were going to have to rent it out to students most likely. Not good!!! They tend to trash your place… We are glad to have sold it and now we don’t have to worry about it or the expenses associated with keeping it on the market.

This was our third contract on the house and after the other two backed out before closing we kept this one to ourselves as to not jinx it… must have worked :). There is hope for all you people out there trying to sell your homes to hit the road. You can do like we did and just go and hope it sells soon, it worked for us… or for some you will have to stay till it sells. We have no regrets but were getting a bit worried…

I now return you back to the regularly scheduled blog about RV’ing in the Florida Keys… at least the pictures are from the Keys!

Odds and ends…

One of the new shifters for my wife's bicycle came it today as well as the Roadmaster base plate for our Honda CRV.  I am still waiting for the 2 inch hitch and the bicycle rack I ordered to come in.  Nothing like cutting it close…

We have had some serious lookers at the house and the car but no buyers yet so it is starting to look like we will have to leave before they are sold. Sigh…

The worse part is we haven’t heard from the RV Station people about whether or not our Norcold part has arrived.  We can’t go anywhere without a refrigerator.  Still need to have the generator serviced and we still need to fill up the propane and the diesel tank as well as check out the plumbing after all the freezes.

On a brighter note we did start moving some of our “keeper” stuff into the rig and it is starting to feel like it is our home… and sooner or later it will be…

I better start planning our route to North Carolina soon…

The day the music died…

Well we have been selling a lot of items on craigslist and we also already had two garage sales… and as I mentioned in the last post there isn’t much left to throw away.  So what is next?  The BIG stuff… and the first to go (besides my table saw – it went in a garage sale) is our piano.Well it went on craigslist about three weeks ago… and after several “I am interested” emails I finally had a serious inquiry and a fellow and his wife came by to look at it.  A really nice Asian couple… she looked over the piano very carefully and you could tell she knew what she was doing. When it was all over we agreed to a price and they will come pick up the piano on August 1st… There is no doubt this piano will be loved because she was a very gifted piano player… I can hear the music now…

… bye bye Miss American Pie… I drove my Chevy to the levy and the levy was dry…

I would have very much like to keep our piano…

But I knew I was out of luck… The day the music died…

Too much going on…

Well the inspectors were suppose to come to the house at noon today and when I arrived at 11:45 the A/C inspector was already working in the driving rain. It started raining early here and rained all morning but there was a lull in the activity and the A/C guy was busy checking pressures. I let him do his thing and checked my rain gauge… 5.72 inches WOW!  And more in the forecast… so the phone call happens… the other two inspectors canceled due to weather.  Wimps!

So we are rescheduled for Friday at noon to finish the inspections and determine the verdict. In the meantime we are diligently looking for a place to stay once we are evicted from the home… A word of caution for all you full timer want-a-bes out there… If you live in a college town like we do it is very difficult to find a place that will rent to you without a one year lease. We only need 6-7 months… so we are still looking… I want to thank those of you who wished us luck in selling the house; now we need your well wishes for finding a place to live! Yikes!

wow… part 3… HOUSE SOLD!

Well what a whirlwind week and half we have had… after listing our house on zillow.com and having a lady call for a showing that resulted in three grueling days of cleaning the house we had gotten an offer on the house! This was during the same week we scheduled our first garage sale… so we had a showing while the garage was stuffed to brim with “stuff” lots of “stuff”… Oh well…

So we go back and forth with the lady (offer, counter offer, offer counter offer etc.) and we finally come to an agreement on everything so unofficially the house is sold!  Pending a good inspection there should be no reason for it not to close on July 16, 2010.  We will take the signed contract over to their realtor later today. This has turned out to be a real interesting deal since it will be an all cash purchase so there will be no appraisal to worry about, no financing to worry about, only the inspection of which I am not really worried about. So what am I worried about?

Where the heck are we going to live until we hit the road? We have no RV and now after July 16th we will be homeless as well… We have slightly less than five and one half weeks to sell all the rest of our stuff we don’t want… find a place to live… move into the place to live and still shop for the elusive RV…

Wow… now back to the garage sale… we did get rid of a lot of stuff that people actually paid us for… even better there was a fellow who asked about a grill and a smoker to which I replied that we were going to eventually sell everything so I took him out back to look at the smoker and grill and he said he wants them and will call back in 3 weeks to come get them (since I still need them for a while yet).  He also put dibs on my chest freezer.  Another young lady heard our story and has dibs on our bedroom suite, our couch and loveseat and a side board. This turned out to be a good garage sale…

Now if only we had an RV before we have to move out on the 16th…

wow… part 2…

Well remember that phone call I got after I put a bunch of photos of our house along with a description on zillow.com?  Remember we hadn’t quite gotten to the point of actually listing our property but I did put in a "Make me move!" price when I first set it up. I know many of you were crossing your fingers for me (please keep doing so).  And after three days of hard labor cleaning and primping and staging the house the lady and her and her husband and their realtor in tow came by the house for a visit and a walk through.

I walked them through the house to let them get to know the place better and then I chatted with the realtor.  I heard a few of their comments about how they could add this or modify that… They stayed about 25 minutes and the only question they asked was “…if I was firm on closing no sooner that August.”  To which I replied … “Everything is negotiable! :) :) :) 

Well that leads up to today and I first got an email from the lady saying I should be hearing from their realtor later on … sure enough I did and he said he was going to bringing me an offer to review later this evening or tomorrow. So now here I am writing the blog waiting to hear from him… I think they are making me wait just to make me nervous and more negotiable… not gonna work… nope… it’s not gonna work… dang it where is he!!!

Keep those fingers crossed and wish us the best...

Wow...

Saturday, May 29, 2010

So just when I thought i was going to get to do some research on toads the stuff hits the fan.  My next blog was to be about the Subaru Outback my other potential toad... but nooooooooooo... that all got changed by a phone call!  You see some time ago I put a bunch of photos of our house along with a description on zillow.com because I was getting things ready to put my house on the market. This is a real estate site that lets you list your property for free and has different pricing structures for more services.  Well the really cool thing about this site is the fact they let you list a "Make me move!" price when you first set it up... so I did!  So I put a make me move price on the house and that was over 3 months ago but recently I get a call from a  lady who says she saw my ad and wanted to know if I really wanted to sell the house... of course I said "Yes!"... so she wants to see the house on Tuesday.  So that sounds great ehhhh... well you see the house is not nearly ready for a showing because it still needs about 50 hours more work to get it ready.  Tuesday is only 72 hours away... not good ... lots of work to do...

So we spent much of this fine Saturday scouring floors, mulching beds, moving stuff to the garage for the future garage sale... and 8 hours later we both felt like someone beat us up... so here we are and we get to do it all over again tomorrow. But there is a bright side. Even if they don't want the house this made us accelerate getting it ready so we can officially list it for sale sooner than we planned. So after a few cold adult beverages and a good burger  at a local tavern we are now re-energized and ready for another grueling day tomorrow... wish us the best...

The punch list...

Well before anything really can happen the house has to be readied for sale.  We would like to get everything done around the house in order to have the house fully ready to be put on the market in late spring to early summer.  Although that is several months away it will take time to do all the little things we need to do to have the house staged properly.  So yesterday we went around the house visiting each room and wrote down on a tablet each and every item that a potential buyer might have issues with. 

"What do you think about the color in this room?" "What about those window treatments?" "Do we need to change out that light fixture?" "Should we steam clean this carpet or just replace it"  These were some of the many questions that arose as went from room to room.  The end result was a list for each room of things that had to be done and things that might be done if time and costs permit. We will attack each room one at a time and then in early spring we will address the landscaping to provide the necessary curb appeal to help sell our home. Looks like we have a plan and now all I have to do is do the work...

One step closer...

Well today I have finished up one of the projects I needed to complete before going full time in the RV in a little over a year.  I bought an ION USB turntable to convert my LP's to digital music some time ago and have now converted a couple of hundred LP's into songs saved onto my computer.  I liked the turntable so much we got one for my wife's brother since he recently was wishing there was someway to play his LP's again since he broke his needle on his turntable.

Now this took a lot of time... but the time was enjoyed as I was able to reminisce about the good old days while listening to the songs of yesteryear.  Like where were you and what were you doing when the Beatles sang "I want to hold your hand" or when Janis Joplin sang "Mercedes Benz" or when Neil Young sang "The Needle and the Damage Done"...????  These were pretty easy for me place myself back in time and relive some enjoyable moments in my life.

Other moments in my life I relived when I play Pink Floyd, Greatful Dead, Led Zepplin and Uriah Heap albums...  Funny these moments in time were hazier than others :).

Burning the LP's into digital land...

Well I am now using my brand new turn table that comes complete with a USB cable that plugs directly into my computer.  Comes complete with software that can be used to catalog the music by using the dead space between songs that effectively breaks out each song separately.  This way I am able to play an album, cut each song out, name them with their singer, album name, and title and save them into my itunes folders.

Being able to convert my records into digital music means I can rid myself of the 2-300 lbs of LP's I own and put them all on a very compact external hard drive.  The down sizing continues.... and the side benefit is going through all the nostalgia and memories that each record reveals through each song recorded.  Now where was I when The Beatles sang Let it Be?   Hmmmmmm........

Getting rid of the old slides...

Well as my wife and I went out for the tail end of the black Friday shopping I came across a slide scanner at our local Kohl's.  It was made by Innovative Technologies and was under $50.00 bucks so I thought I would give it a try.  The other option was to go online and pay 29 cents per slide to have them do them for me.

Well the slide scanner was very easy to set up on my computer and was easy enough to use so I proceeded to turn slides into digital images one at a time.  The interface between the hardware and the software was not very sophisticated therefore the quality of the images produced from the slides was not the best of quality.  So I mostly focused on converting slides that had people in them and ignored converting those with scenery... after all I will have plenty of time to revisit all those locations and retake those shots with a digital camera :) .

Above is an example of a slide converted into a digital picture.  Photoshop was used to remove the obvious blemishes and spots on the slide but as you can see the clarity is not all that great.  The picture is one of me and my trusty dog, Fred, in 1981 on top of enchanted rock in central Texas.  Enchanted rock is the second largest exposed batholith in the United States with the other being Stone Mountain in Georgia (on my list as a place to visit).  One more task can now be checked off the list of downsizing and reducing our stuff... next up is converting the LP's into digital music!