In my last blog post (click here to read), I gave ten tips for staging your home to sell, as well as a mention of extra precautions we took while selling our house in the midst of a pandemic.
Because the real estate market was hot, with few houses in our price range available for sale in our city, we ended up having a lot of showings of our home. Many houses in our city were selling within days or even hours at prices above list price. We were anxious to see how our house was going to fare.
I found this period of time extremely stressful. My husband and son had their hands full trying to work full-time from home, and I had my own writing deadlines. There were many times we felt like we were at the mercy of the realtors and the buying public..and it wasn’t a nice feeling.
To top it all off, the day after we put our house up for sale, I started having some medical problems which left me exhausted and in discomfort.
After our deep clean prior to putting our house up for sale, we still needed to clean and tidy our home for at least an hour every time we had a showing. I found this process excruciating—I have never been the best housekeeper—while I was dealing with abdominal pain. I also found the repetitiveness mind numbing.
Further, it was difficult for me to be out of our home for an hour and a half at a time when all I wanted to do was lie down and rest. I remember one day when I was in such discomfort all I could do was sit on a bench at the pond a few blocks away from my house and pray that the pain would go away.
In the end, keeping our house spotless was well worth our efforts. The most common feedback we received was how well our house showed, and how clean it was. I chuckle at the irony.
More importantly, we got an offer (albeit low) on our house the very first day, and then a second, signed offer within 72 hours, which we accepted. We were elated.
Because the sale was conditional, we had to keep up the showings, for weeks. We did not have the luxury of going to a summer cabin as I heard many other sellers did, nor was there anywhere we could go safely other than outdoors as we were in the middle of a pandemic. It was truly a test of our patience and perseverance at a time when we were barely holding on by our fingernails.
The closing date of our house sale was fast approaching, as was our planned departure date. We had heard that the buyers still had not sold their home although they had an offer. Would they take the offer and honour their contract with us, or we would be left high and dry less than two weeks before we planned to leave?
Click here to read the next instalment in "Prairie Girl Goes Coastal."