Congratulations, you bought a home … You now have five days to list your home.

Our offer for buying our house was accepted … Yay! And, now the clock begins – we have 5 days to put our home of 16 years on the market to sell … yes, you read that right … 5 days. Were we ready to sell? Kind of. Was it the timing we were hoping for? Nope. But that is OK … we will be ready … or as ready as we can.

After initially meeting with our neighborhood real estate experts (The Rosie Rourke Team at Keller Williams Realty), we had thought that we had time to get the house ready for selling and at the same time look for a new home to move into.

But as fate had it … and as what usually happens with our lives … the later of that plan came first – we just bought our dream home. And with that home acceptance (being contingent on our house selling) we had to put our home on the market within 5 days.

We thought we had time.

Maybe start now getting things that we knew we wanted to update getting checked off our checklist and be ready to list our home in at the earliest a month (or two) and then we could negotiate with the buyers to possibly have an extended close or rent-back until it was time for us to move into our new home (which wasn’t for another 6 months). Right now it was early March. The flowers were not even close to being in bloom for the best “curb appeal” and the weather reporter just announced that we are expecting it to snow this week.

Our house was clean – it always looks show home ready – but we had so many plans of things we wanted to do before putting our home on the market. We had some known updates to the house and we also wanted to bring in an inspector to find out what we didn’t know and get that updated as well. Along with all of that, we had to store some of our belongings … and we had “stuff” and our walls were covered with art. We had to “get a move on” to get ready to be “Ready For Showings”.

We’ve got you.

Luckily, Rosie, Liz and our whole real estate team and their three words “We’ve got you” made everything a bit better. And, without them, I don’t know that we could have pulled off everything in time – both for getting ready to show the house and getting ready to close the house. Why? Because they had “People” and by that I mean they were like our Fairy Godmother’s who had people to help us get our home ready and with every home update helped coordinate making it all happen.

You’ve got an offer.

10 Days. That was the timing to sell our home. 10 Days and our last offer we received went into mutual agreement. They say everything happens in the right time and that truly is the case because this buyer loved the house. Loved the color. Loved the spaces (inside and out). 10 Days to sell our home of 16 years and now we have a little over a month and a half for the house to close.

Finding temporary digs.

Now the other frenzy begins. Where are we going to live until our house build was completed and ready for us to move into? How many boxes was it going to take to pack up our home? Do we really want to keep this item and pay for the storage fee (since it was by weight)? Who should we use for movers (and storage)? How do we pack these boxes for the easiest unload?

Everything fell into place.

Our questions were quickly answered. Again everything fell into place … at the right time. We chose an apartment near our home for an easy transition – an apartment we were familiar with because our son had just moved from there. We interviewed three movers and chose the one who came recommended by our agent. Bonus, they could store our boxes and furniture that we were not able to fit in a 900 square foot apartment – at their facility – in sealed containers. As for boxing our things. It took A LOT of boxes, A LOT of tape, and a labeling and color coding system that would help us with a “hopefully” quick unload when we finally got to our final destination – Our Brand New Dream Home.