Selling our house

Here’s it’s the middle of February, and I already see a few early signs of the spring to come. A few of the bushes have leaf buds and I saw some early flowers peeking through on some of the plants. Mark and I have finally decided to sell the house, and though we’ll miss it a lot, there’s a certain financial relief that we are looking forward to. Not sure yet where we’ll end up renting, and we’ve even thrown out a lot of crazy ideas like moving to Canada, but nothing is firm yet. Since I’m the one unemployed, I have the most time to organize getting the house ready for sale. So I’m spending my days calling contractors to get bids, and packing. We have a tentative date of March 1st, but we’re probably going to move it back one week to March 8th. Even then, there are a lot of things that need to be done before the house goes on the market, and it can feel overwhelming. We have no idea whether the place will even sell, but I have a feeling that someone will buy it up quickly because it is an adorable place with lots of thing going for it.

I’ve been off work for about 3 weeks now, and I am enjoying sleeping in. At the beginning, I was stressed about finances, but with the sale of the house, I think we’ll be fine for a while. I’m postponing figuring out what to do next until we are moved into our next place. Mark has been super busy teaching 4 classes and a full time job, which means he teaches Tues, Wed, Thurs nights, and all day Saturday. All his other free time gets taken up with grading 4 classes of homework, which leaves him little time for anything else. One of his classes will finish early, so he’ll regain his wed nights and Saturdays for a month, so that will be a relief.

Other than that, things are going well in general. I’ve been distracted with the decision to sell the house, but now that we have made a definitive decision, things are moving forward. I haven’t concentrated on my health as much as I was planning on, exercise still seems like too much work, but I’m not too worried about it right now since I am burning a lot of calories packing so that should suffice until we move. One of the decisions we are struggling with now is whether to get a super cheap apartment or get a moderate priced house rental. Where ever we end up, it will probably be temporary so we have some flexibility on where to live. If we end up in an apartment, I’ll miss the quiet of having a house, but we may have more discretionary income for traveling and fun things, so it’s a tradeoff.

Well I guess I should get back to packing. Mark and I own too many books, I’ve already packed 17 boxes of books and there’s still many more to go. We have a home stager company coming in on Monday to help me figure out how to stage the house so it looks awesome, and I really want to pack as much clutter and books away before they come.