Middlesex is on the market

Middlesex is on the market and Britani had an open house yesterday. They have done a fantastic job of cleaning it up.  In fact, Karen told me that it cost $600 to get the windows cleaned.  It was worth it, the house looks so much brighter inside.
http://www.cbgundaker.com/property/details/199614/MLS-15035996/6-Middlesex-Drive-St-Louis-MO-63144.aspx
The house has been staged and it looks so much better.  Luckily, we are all still happier that we chose White rather than this house.
Maggie approves on the bed in the master bedroom apparently!!!!

Very impressive tarting up of the master bathroom.  It looks so much better but still very small

The sitting room is lovely too.  Didn't get pictures of the rest of the house

Another visit to our new house

We met our designers at the White house on Friday morning.

They have already started working on tearing the pool out-it certainly doesn't look the same any more!!!

This is the back of the house.  We haven't been in this storage room since the Open House, they were using it as a bar, we are hoping we can get all our outside stuff in here!!!!

Ben's favourite room, he calls it the pool room.  He's not going to like it if we change it too much.  I suspect the fish will be leaving with the current owners

We got our Sold sign!!!!

The buyers got their loan commitment on Thursday and we got our Sold sign on Friday.  Happy day!!!!!  Now I just need to start packing for our move out at the end of July!!!

New developments (our crazy life)

I cannot believe that I haven't had time to do a house update since June 9, and so much has happened in such a short time.  We had our Patton house inspection done on Wednesday.  It was a really busy day.  We met the owner, the electrician and the design people (http://www.nextprojectstudio.com) first thing in the morning.  I spent 3 hours talking to the design people.  We decided that the kitchen would never work for us and we talked about how we could update it.  Sam talked to them about remodeling the bathroom in the basement and the unfinished part of the basement (including the laundry room area).  We left the house in the morning figuring that we would have to spend at least 50K on the house to make it work for us, even if just for a short while.

The first red flag of the day was the fact that the electrical panel was in the basement bathroom and would have to be removed to another location.  The electrician gave us an estimate to move it and Sam had already planned to upgrade it anyway, so it wasn't that big a deal.

The inspectors came in the afternoon.  They found several things that needed to be fixed.  In addition to the electrical panel, the garage roof needed to be redone and the siding needed to be fixed (it was too close to the ground) and there were a few minor things.  We got the written inspection report on Thursday and Sam had talked to Britani about writing up a reply to the inspection, we had until midnight on Thursday to do it.

When I got home on Thursday afternoon, Sam was on the phone with Karen talking about the house.  She told him that Britani had told her we were planning on spending a lot of money on updating the house.  Karen said it was a mistake to spend a lot on it because we would never be able to sell the house for that amount of money, even if we stayed there for a while.  The work that needs to be done on the house is really too much for us since we don't want to live there indefinitely.

When we first talked with Karen about selling our house (way back in February!) she had mentioned that there was a house on White that was going on the market.  The big drawback (for us) was that it had a pool.  Sam immediately said we would not be interested because of the pool.  Well, Britani had told me on Wednesday that their sale had fallen through (for the second time) and that they were going to fill the pool in.  When Karen was talking to Sam, she mentioned again that the house on White was still available and the pool was going.  We decided we would go and look at the house and met Britani there are 6:30.  We decided to write a contract on it and let the Patton inspection expire.  The sellers on White accepted our contract within 2 hours, so we went from a contract on one house to another in 6 hours!!!!  We are now on our 3rd house and they are on their 3rd buyers, so maybe this is some kind of numerology karma....

This is the link to the house:
http://www.cbgundaker.com/property/details/187600/MLS-15023395/9380-White-Avenue-Brentwood-MO-63144.aspx

We got the inspection report from the previous buyers and have written a reply to that.  Just waiting to hear.....

General update

We are having the house appraised today.  Last step in the process.
The Northcote house is under contract (if only it would have worked for us)
Berry Ave is an open house on Sunday (couple of blocks from us).  May have to look at it out of curiosity

Instead, this will be number five. Not sure for how long....

http://www.realtor.com/realestateandhomes-detail/2331-Patton-Ave_Brentwood_MO_63144_M73253-96616
This teeny tiny house (for us) is going to be our #5.  We decided to make an offer on this house and it was accepted.  The mortgage payment will be half what we were looking at paying in rent.  We are doing this process one step at a time.  We sold our house, now we have something in Brentwood before the start of the school year.  We are trying to decide if we can get all our stuff into this home or have to put some in storage.  Hopefully we can cull enough to make it work.

This is the incredibly narrow stairway into the basement

 Bathroom on the main floor

 Maggie's bedroom

 Our bedroom

 Ben's bedroom in the basement

 Family room in the basement

 Dining room

 Looking from the dining room into the front room

 Kitchen

This could/should have been number five

The owners of Middlesex counter offered on the house while I was in Dallas.  They are holding out for a higher price and are willing to wait until the house goes on the market and see what they can get for it.  With the improvements we would need to do, the house would cost us close to $600,000.  I told Sam that if we were going to spend that much, then we should at least look at a $600,000 house.  There is one on the market now that we had not considered because it was so expensive.  We looked at it yesterday, it is so beautiful.  It's like having your own estate!!!!

The lady that owns it has collected a huge amount of unique antiques and the house is like a mini museum!!!

The best part of the house (in my opinion) is the sunken sitting room (with the vaulted ceiling you can't see here) and the garden room off it.

It is so hard to turn our back on this house, it is absolutely beautiful.  However, it's at the very top of what we can afford and we'd have nothing left to do anything.  We made a very difficult decision this morning and decided to rent a house we looked at yesterday.  We want to be in the position that we have options when we buy something.  We are not in that position right now.  We will just have to wait until the right house comes along.  Essentially, we are back to Plan A.  We intended to do things one step at a time and try to get it right.  That's what we are going to do....

Further Developments

We got the inspection report for Rockford yesterday.  There is very little on it that we need to do, so should be easy.  We filled out the contract to make an offer on Middlesex.  Let's hope this goes through OK.....