Real Estate in Sacramento

We worked our backsides off getting the Sacramento home ready for sale. 3 weeks. Long nights, early mornings. Painted the laundry area and kitchen that didn't get painted when we moved in 3 years ago. Cleaned. Donated loads and loads and loads to Goodwill and other charities. Took boxes of books to donate to the library. Quit buying food, started eating weird stuff that was in the back of the pantry and in the freezer (tell me, WHY would I have purchased 6 kinds of canned beans, coconut milk and 6 piecrusts???). Got sick of eating Hot Pockets. Used a toothbrush to clean those ucky corners in the moulding on the kitchen cupboards.

The average time-to-sale in our neighborhood was 4-6 DAYS. The selling prices are extremely inflated. It is a GOOD time to be a seller in Sacramento.

On Thursday, May 22, we left Sacramento with a loaded up car (again, LOADED). By the time we'd gotten as far as Weed (still in California), Anita had called my cel phone to let us know that she'd gotten the lock box on the house and would start showing it on Friday morning. We drove to my Mom's in Oregon (just outside of Eugene). Stayed the night a Mom's and got our first hot, REAL-food meal in over 3 weeks.

We left a bunch of boxes of very, very important papers, our computer and a big bag of dirty laundry at Mom's and headed on up to Vancouver (130+ miles north) on Friday morning. We stopped in Salem on the way and picked up a fax machine at Office Depot, so we were ready to do real estate stuff when the need arose. Got to Vancouver, picked up a few groceries, and walked into our new home.

Not surprisingly, nothing had changed. Truoc was to have emptied the house, but when we arrived, everything was as we left it, including the flower arrangement that my coworkers at Agilent had sent when we were here in February/March. Well, my promise still stands, more on Truoc and his situation in a later post.

Okay. Met with Truoc on Saturday morning, told him he had to get in gear. By about noon on Saturday, we got a phone call from Anita. She'd just been waiting until she was sure that we were there - we had an offer on our house! Actually, the first people to look at the house on Friday made an immediate, full-price offer by noon-ish on Friday. Well, the first thing Mr. W. had to do is go get the fax machine out of the car and figure out how to set it up, then Anita faxed us the offer. We discussed it with her, we discussed it with one another, then we signed what we had to sign and faxed it back. 4-1/2 HOURS. That's how long it took to 'sell' our house.

We drove back to Mom's house for the weekend (it was the Memorial Day weekend), got lots more REAL food and basically zoned out for the remainder of the weekend, then went back to Vancouver on Tuesday. Oh! And Mom did all of our laundry for us!

Next: The Best Laid Plans