The Santinis: Buying and Selling part 2

Nick and I went to a lot of open houses in DeWitt during the time that our house was on the market, knowing that most of the houses we saw would be long gone before we had a chance to sell our house, because the market in DeWitt is a lot hotter than Charlotte. We still needed to look because we wanted to figure out exactly where we wanted to live in DeWitt. Did we want to live in a neighborhood similar to the one that we currently lived in or did we want to be closer to town. We ended up deciding that we wanted to live near town. We wanted to live close enough to walk downtown. Nicks Aunt and Uncle live in one of the neighborhoods that is close enough to walk downtown, so we would drive through the area every so often. One day when we drove through the neighborhood we saw a for sale by owner sign. We stopped and took a picture of the sign and gave the number a call. At the same time I asked Aunt Kathy about the house and the owners. Aunt Kathy knew that they were not in town, but said that she knew their son and would try to get a hold of him for me. She was able to get a hold of him and passed on his info to me. I called him and he gave me his dads cell phone number. Jim (the owner) and I talked and he said that if we wanted to see it, he would have his son meet us at the house. We set up a date and checked it out. I loved it! Nick liked it, but was way more practical about the work that needed to be done to it. The next weekend we asked if we could see it again because we wanted to show our kids the house. We also invited Ralph and Jan to come and see it. Everyone seemed to like it, although, I think there were some hesitations. I enjoy watching HGTV and knew that when buying a house, you can change the house, but you cannot change the location. After the second showing, I was ready to make and offer and Nick agreed. The offer was going to have to be contingent on the sale of our current house. Being that Jim and Cathy were in Florida for the winter, they were ok with that. I called Jim on a Saturday and told him that we would like to buy his house and gave him our offer based on the comparables that I had looked at in the surrounding area. Our offer was a little low for him, but we were able to find a happy middle. At his suggestion we then hired a lawyer to do a formal write up of the house sale. It was written into the contract that if we did not sell our house by the end of June the contract would be void, so we now had a little more stress to the selling process, but were still positive it would sell. The next month we started getting offers. We lowered the price of our current house to try to sell it a little faster and got two horrible offers. The second offer we had actually countered back to them and they were considering it when our third offer came in. She wanted the house really bad and put in a full price offer without seeing the house because our realtor let her know we had an offer on the table. Just like that, our house was sold. She gave us everything we wanted and even let us stay in the house for an extra month while school ended. It was really the perfect situation.