House for Sale?

 After seeing the *stifling* cost of living in Claremont we decided our next step in the process was to put our house on the market and see how much we could get for it. We spent weeks finishing all the little projects like the dreaded kitchen beam among others. Next came packing up 1/3 of all our belongings to make it look bigger and cleaning and cleaning and cleaning and then staging and decorating with lots of help from my mom and Aunt JeNee. It turned out beautifully! It felt pretty satisfying to see it all clean all at once and really recognize what an amazing property this is. It was also expensive and that makes me feel a little nauseous because I'm still recovering from my CES budget days where spending money on decorations was "frivolous and unnecessary"... I'll keep working on that. In order to buy a home that would work for our family in Claremont and still be able to manage the cost of living increase and the tax increase we need a pretty heft down payment. Luckily we have built a lot of equity into our home with the remodels- particularly the guest house that Evan has poured his blood sweat and tears into the last two years of our lives. There is a family one street over that sold their home the month before so we called to see what price per square footage they got in their 18 (!!!) offers they recieved after their house was on the market for 5 days. We calculated ours accordingly and used a for sale by owner platform that allowed us to list it on the MLS without a selling agent to save on commission costs. We had around 15 showings in the week it was on the market and 5 of those people told us they were going to submit an offer.... guess how many of them did? None! A few things I felt during the process... My sister in law Sarah texted me at the beginning of the week saying she had listened to President Nelsons recent talk on miracles from conference and was thinking about me. I told her I wasn't sure if my miracle was going to be that I sold my house in the hottest real estate market of all time... or that I didn't. There was this off feeling about the timing... I told Evan I felt like Nephi when he tries to buy the brass plates with all his gold... like its a good try but not quite it. I was also worried we might get offers that were below our asking price and I wouldn't know whether or not we should accept them in light of what we needed to make things work in California. I prayed that if we weren't supposed to sell our house that we wouldn't get any offers. Well turns out God still answers prayers. So what does that mean about grad school and what do we do next? Still waiting on the answer to so many questions but Evan and I both strongly felt there was something "off"... a puzzle piece that hasn't fallen into place yet. Check back for next weeks episode of The Fox Tales...
































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