The Big Adventure

For more than 2 years we have been encouraged to move closer to Arlington by "our kids" We have been cajoled and reminded and encouraged. And for the most part we ignored the requests cuz we had decided WE WEREN'T MOVING AGAIN.

Then came Lillian Elizabeth, our one and probably only grand daughter and our attitudes changed.

We "looked" a little in Weatherford, in '09 thinking the smaller city is closer to Arlington, but still not in "the big city". We got a realtor and spent a couple of afternoons looking at houses in our price range. We did learn one thing---Weatherford is NOT a small town and seems to have some huge infrastructure problems at the moment. In January we found an Arlington realtor and began looking there. We thought we'd have to give up, because nothing was what we wanted--size, price, condition.
Then we found the house. We put in a contract for $5,000 under asking price and were accepted. We had some negotiations concerning repairs and mineral rights that were resolved eventually.
We learned the house had been under more than one contract, but problems were not resolved with those earlier contracts. The owners are a young family raising funds to travel to Nicaragua to become missionaries. And they were very anxious to sell as quickly as possible.

When we had all the obstacles hurdled and the deal seemed to be going through, we began making plans to eventually sell our Brownwood house. We asked a nice neighbor who happens to be a realtor to come over and advise us how to make our house more "sell-able" . We discussed painting, redoing bathrooms, replacing an outside door and the garage doors (probably originals from the '60's). We talked to a handyman about the outside door and the garage doors were ordered. When he went to our financial advisor on a Tuesday to move some funds, Nick told him about our planned move and swore him to secrecy. We weren't telling anyone in Brownwood about our plans at that time, because we wanted to be SURE that things were going to happen. He happened to mention to Nick that he had friends who had been looking for a house in the Oak Park neighborhood for a year. Nick told our realtor to contact Ryan and the wheels were set in motion.
When I came home from tutoring on Thursday of that week, I was told that prospective buyers wanted to see the house at three thirty that day. We went into a frenzy of straightening and cleaning. We were as ready as possible by 3 and we left. We were told to be gone from the house at least an hour. We drove by at 4:30 and there were 3 cars there but all were gone by 5. We heard from our realtor that the buyer's fiancee wasn't able to get off work that Thurs and they would like to come back Saturday afternoon. (Remember all this is before the house was even "for sale" officially)

They came to look on Saturday afternoon and by 5 that afternoon we had a signed contract on the house. They also did not require that we paint, or do any of the little "prettying" things we were prepared to do. We had already ordered the garage door and had had scheduled the handyman to replace the shreaded outside door. Again, after an inspection we had some negotiations, but the contract holds.

More later---- THE CULLING AND WEEDING OF STUFF--THE AUCTION