Our house was never going to have any problems selling. It's a first home kind of house. We bought it like that nine years ago and ended up staying. And we've done a fair bit of work to it over the years.
And so it proved. We got concrete offers in the first few days.
One was a cash buyer who wanted to buy the place to rent out, which our immediate neighbours might not have been thrilled with but what can you do? You can only weed your own pumpkin patch, right? So we verbally accepted her offer, she sent a written offer through and before we could even sign it, she started changing terms. Subject to X. Within Y weeks or the offer is reduced to Z. She turned up at the door claiming our estate agent (or 'realtor', if you will) and solicitor were useless and we were going to lose the sale if we didn't do this and that.
In the meantime a young man and his mum came to see the house and he loved it. He was recently married but didn't bring his wife to a second viewing until he'd had a matriarchal nod of approval. His young wife loved it too. They walked around saying things like 'This could be the baby's room' and 'Yeah, you WISH you'll get a pool table in the garage, mister!'. Holding hands all the while. They made an offer. It was less than the first one. But we took it. We thought we would rather have a young couple in our home than some cunt simply using it to make money.
So we've now found a house. It is too expensive for us. But we fell in love with it the moment we set foot in the place, in a way that you can't fake. Everything in it was perfect and beautiful and I found it difficult to remain coolly aloof and business-like with the selling couple, particularly as we knew we couldn't quite make the asking price. But every part of the house elicited a fresh cry of delight. We had been looking for an inbetweener house, but this would almost definitely be our forever house. The selling couple, an older couple, told us they were moving smaller as their children had fled the nest. We told them we were going in the opposite direction and would be needing an extra room and the woman hugged Nicola. They were dreadful old hippies. We left telling them we couldn't really afford it but that we were really grateful to have seen their beautiful home and we meant it.
We put in a Hail Mary offer the next day. It's not what they're asking. They've just got back, through their estate agent, to say that they've had an offer above what they were asking but that they want to sell to us as we reminded them of themselves twenty years ago. We don't even have to beat the other offer. Just get a little closer to it. After dealing with flimflam artists and buyers and sellers and solicitors and estate agents, I'm genuinely typing this with a tear in my eye that there are still people out there with decency in their hearts.
We've nudged the offer up slightly, all the while listening out for the ominous creakings of our mortgage agreement in principle. Keep your fingers crossed for us. Sorry for the word-dump; I just had to talk to someone about it.
