Cooking with gas...

Just a quick note to say we signed another contract on the house yesterday - and we think this one might stick! Party - Bonus. Now we're cooking with gas...

The buyers seem to have a clue this time, and have got pre-approval for finance (good plan) and have also seen the last building and pest report that the first-contract morons got done (also good plan). Assuming nothing TOTALLY left-field happens, we should be good to go this time.

They also agreed to settle before Christmas, which is what we were aiming for. It's all looking good.

Anyhow, we're heading to Yeppoon on the 15th of December for a week, then coming back to Brisbane for Christmas. We reckon we need to be moving gear on about the 12th, to ensure we have enough time to clean up the place beore handing the keys over prior to leaving. 2 weeks and we'll be out of here! (a bit less actually). Truly scary.

On another note, we went and took another look at our caravan on Monday - they ran through how to use everything, and we're more convinced than ever that it's a great little van, can't wait to get it on the road. They were kindly enough to offer to make up a bit of plyboard with legs mounted on it, so that the cot we'll sleep Grace in is nice and stable in the dining secton of the caravan. Very schmick, and rather excellent service from the caravan people. Not often you get service like that these days! (how old does THAT sentence make me look).

We pick the van up on the 6th of December, Annex get measured up on the 7th, delivered on the 13th, and we're outta here on the 15th. Gotta love that timing and big margins for error (!!). She'll be right mate.

When something clicks in your head, you can't unclick it

On 22 October, Scott said:

It's only just hit me now that this is ACTUALLY happening - that the adventure is going to happen, and we're on track to be away before Christmas. We knew the plan (loose as it is), but it's almost like something just clicked in my head that it's a real trip we're going on, rather than just a plan. Can't wait!

The pain of all these on-again off-again contracts is that we have both had something "click" in our heads,... And now we are being asked to "unclick" it. That doesn't work. It's like being asked not to love someone. You can't and it hurts.

I wish someone would stop dangling this carrot in front of our faces. We're tired. We're cranky. We have jumped through a thousand hoops for a thousand different people. Now, we just want to get going. Yeppoon is calling to me.

For my own sanity,...

Selling our house is proving to be much more painful than we anticipated. Perhaps we were spoilt last time when our townhouse sold in 4 days FOR $25K more than anticipated, and the new buyers had absolutely no concerns with the building inspection (or the floor to ceiling cracks that you could see daylight through!).

Our current home is definitely proving much harder to shift,... I sometimes wonder if it's because we're dealing with the first-home buyer market, rather than investors. It seems to me that both offers on the property fell over because the buyers made rookie mistakes. Why is that? Surely the purchase of a home is a big enough investment that people would do their homework on it ie. think it through, discuss their finances with the bank or a mortgage broker, get some informed advice etc.

The past few weeks have been so absolutely frustrating. It's been a combination of feeling like we're just caretakers in our own home, and having to keep it pristine in case of inspections. I have a toddler that likes to pull everything out of cupboards and drawers. Pristine is not an option. It is so stressful having to try and tidy up constantly, or get up a few hours before an inspection and work in a frenzy while trying to keep an eye on an energetic little girl.

I hope and pray that one of the people our real estate agent spoke with today will actually come through with the cash and buy the house. For my own selfish sanity,...

What The??? Part 2

Well, not sure what we have done to deserve this, but the second house offer fell through today. The people who made the offer decided that they needed some more money to get married next February, and should wait until then to buy a house.

Some open questions :

- Do you think it would have been a good idea to think about this before you wasted the real estate's time, our time, and your own time looking at houses?

- What were you thinking PUTTING AN OFFER on a house when you had obviously not made up your mind fully?

I mean seriously people... How hard is it? 1) Decide to buy house 2) Source money 3) Find House 4) Buy house. In that order. It's not rocket science.

We have another open house tomorrow - at least the real estate had the smarts to not cancel it - apparently we have a lot of people coming to this one, so we're beliving we have the real buyer coming in tomorrow! Here's hoping.

Oh incidentally, we're still going to Yeppoon on the 15th of December, house sale or not. We reckon we deserve it.

Sold - Again!

Just a quick note to say that we got an offer on our house today - of the full asking price!! How cool is that? They are signing the contract at 1pm tomorrow. Sweet!

Of course, this contract will be subject to building & pest inspection and finance (as they all are). We don't envisage any issues this time - these buyers have spoken to the money lenders, and
apparently it should all be ok. The estate agent has been through all the issues in the last building report already, so they know what to expect.

The only issue we have is settlement time - the standard 30 day contract will land us settling somewhere around Christmas eve - and if you think the banks and solicitors will be nice enough to settle your house when they should rightfully be out there with a glass of chardy and a couple of smoked salmon appetizers, you're kidding yourself. :-) Options are either a short contract, which would be awesome for us - let's hope they can do it) or a long contract which settles somewhere after New Year - avoiding the Christmas/New Year shutdown. It will be interesting to see what happens.

In other news, we have managed to organise getting our hands on the caravan somewhen around the 6th of December. The plan is to go up to Yeppoon for a week before Christmas and see my Aunty Mavis and Uncle Ron. It's about 8 hours drive from here, and will be a nice test for both us and the caravan. It should be good! We're staying Here.

Thoughts

I confess, I have been having evil thoughts. I wanted to go to the home of the people who were supposed to buy our house (but couldn't get the cash together) and throw a pineapple at their heads.

I just think they're stupid idiots. I mean, they drove such a hard bargain with negotiations that we all thought they'd been there before,.... Suspicious me thinks they had,... but I won't bring into question the accuracy of the information on their finance application now, will I?

[Another confession: bitter & twisted thoughts]

Anyway, the real point of the matter is that we are back to square one and I should be cleaning this place up in case of buyer inspections....

[sigh] Over it.

Open For Inspection

We had an "open for inspection" session this morning. This involves making your house cleaner and more tidy than it has ever been (including when you purchased the place) and letting anyone who feels like it take a look through your place. It's not a nice experience (somewhat akin to inviting strangers to look through your family's photo albums - sharing what's precious and personal to you), but if it helps sell the place quicker, then it's got to be a good thing, right?

At least when you do an open house, you prepare for one big visitation of several lots of people, rather than organising your house every time someone wants to take a look at it! Granted, cleaning your house shouldn't be that big a deal, but it sometimes seems nigh on impossible with a toddler in the equation...

Anyhow, talking to the estate agent (Eddie - great guy), it looks like we have a couple of very interested parties after this morning, so let's hope something has come of it! We'll keep you posted.

What The??

Cutting a long story short, the sale of our house fell through this afternoon. The buyer apparently couldn't get the finance approval. I was under the mistaken impression that last night was the date where it became unconditional, but not so according to our solicitors.

We are now back at square 1 - the house goes back on the market tomorrow.

I would like to say a big big BIG thank you to our would-be buyers, who have wasted not only our time, but our money as well (solicitors love this kind of thing, right...). A note for next time, see your financial institution BEFORE you go househunting. Surely this is the logical thing to do? Also, don't leave it until the last minute to think of finance. You had 14 days - trying to organise it in the last few of those 14 days is plain stupid.

I am very annoyed right now. I'm trying not to blow it out of proportion - nobody was hurt, we just have to sell it again. But man... how annoying!

Unconditionally Yours...

Well, today is a big day for us - our house sale went unconditional today. This means that the window in which the buyer can pull out for any reason - including issues with the building inspection, and problems getting a loan for the purchase - is now closed. Translation : we're definitely getting out of here soon! Transfer date (the day which we need to be out) is Wednesday 22nd November.

We plan on moving most of our stuff into storage on Monday the 20th. I booked a moving van today for the move - a 3 tonne jobbie from Budget Rentals. Conveniently, they have a half price deal on Mondays and Tuesdays - Bonus!

My Dad & Brother have graciously offered to build a shed at their place to store our gear while we're travelling. How awesome is that? This is a great solution for a lot of reasons, not least of which is cost. A crappy little storage shed at a storage shed place (I'm sure there is a proper name for them, but I don't know it - and the term "storage shed place", while not elegant, is self explanatory) is upwards of $130 per month - and that's for something small like 2 x 2.5 metres. Considering we're planning on going away for up to 2 years, we'd be looking at around $3k for a tiny little shed! And I'm not even sure that would be big enough for what we need. Craziness...

Anyhow, now we're in the situation of having to pack everything we want to store into boxes. I got a good deal on a bulk lot of secondhand packing boxes off EBay, so now we have plenty of containers to put all our worldly possessions in. It would be so much easier to just pack everything, but we figure we should be trying to get rid of at lest some junk instead of storing it.

With this in mind, we plan on having another garage sale this weekend to clear out at least some of the stuff we don't need/want any more. We had another sale a couple of weeks back and did ok, but this week we'll try and sell the remainder from last time, plus a bunch of stuff like lounge suites, dining suites, and other things we don't particularly want to store. We have found a lot more stuff to sell while clearing out, so it should be pretty big. I hope the weather holds out - there's no way we'll fit everything we want to sell inside our garage, so we'll need to lay a lot of it out on the driveway.

And incidentally, I'm really looking forward to those bargain shoppers who seem perfectly capable of reading your advert in the garage sale section of the paper, but somehow magically become illiterate when it comes to reading the "no buyers before 6am" part :-)

Coping Mechanisms : My plans for coping with the craziness of this adventure

Yesterday, Scott was marvelling at Grace's ability to anticipate the claps in The Wiggles' songs. When they begin to experience patterns of behaviour, babies have a powerful ability to anticipate what happens next. This is why baby experts are all such proponents of routines.

As boring as they sound, routines are comforting and helpful both for baby and [insert here Mother, Father, Nanna or any other carer]. Tizzie Hall says in Save Our Sleep, if your baby is in distress your first logical step is the next thing on their routine.

I miss routine. I feel like the last time I had any kind of routine was when I worked at King Gee Clothing Company in West End. When they were taken over by Sara Lee Corporation and we were all moved to Newmarket my job changed, my duties became chaotic and reactive. My stress levels increased a hundredfold. I remember working, hidden away in the back corner of the warehouse, with tears streaming down my cheeks. I was trying to cope with this crazy situation - as was my boss and every other snappy staff member there. This crazy lack of routine has crept into my private life and has been compounded by becoming a mother. My life is chaos. My home is chaos.

As I reflect back on these times, I can see that life changed but I didn't know how to change my routines (and whatever other coping mechanisms I had) to deal with it. So, with that (and Grace's stress levels) in mind,... I am trying to plan a morning and evening routine for our trip that will get the basic housework done and the baby bathed, fed and ready for play time. We are standing at the threshold of huge change and I want to minimise both Grace's and my stress and maximise our enjoyment of our new adventure.

The routine covers things like times for bottles, meals, getting changed out of our PJ's into our play clothes, cleaning teeth, brushing hair, going for an hour long walk in the pram, nap times, bath times, doing the laundry, washing dishes and food preparation. There is a five hour window each day, after Grace's morning nap time and before the night time rituals of baths and dinner, where we'll have a great opportunity to explore new places. I know it sounds like a regimented life,... but motherhood, to some extent, is very regimented. You just have to look after your baby, whether you're in a house at Ferny Hills or in a caravan tripping up and down the eastern seaboard.

The sale of the house is a bumpy ride

We are nail-biting tonight, stressed out over building inspections and possible complications over the sale of our house. I can't help thinking that the people are just trying to use our aging home and the relevant entries on their building inspection report to force the price back down closer to what they originally offered.

The first amount our buyer offered us was an insult. Even with a building inspection report listing a thousand teeny tiny little issues, the original price remains an insult. We are holding out and there's a sense of indignant anger. How dare they offer us so little! How dare they try and talk us down when we already accepted a lot less than our asking price. It's been a rough road and I'm frustrated by their constant requests for a cheaper house.

Far too tired to continue!