How our home sold in six hours

As I mentioned in my goal update, we sold our home. I thought it would take a little longer than it did. . .like MONTHS longer. There were a few reasons that I thought this:

1. We live in an "affordable housing" area which means buyers have to qualify within income limits, and the paperwork takes time.

2. Because people have these income limits, a lot of times what happens in this trailer park is that owners end up becoming the financing for the buyers since loans for trailers are hard to come by. To spell it out, that means if we did that we wouldn't get all the money up front--we'd be getting a few hundred a month for the next few years, hoping that the buyers would never be late or stop paying or whatever. We were not willing to do that unless we absolutely could not find someone that could pay us cash up front.

3. It usually takes a while to sell a house. . .right?

So although we aren't planning on moving until mid-summer, I thought it would be wise to at least list the trailer at the affordable housing office in case someone that qualified was looking right then, and we would start advertising about a month later if we didn't hear anything. 

Mid-March on a Monday I walked downtown with the kids to list our home for sale. The man at the office said he'd send out an email in a couple of days to the people who were on the affordable housing list. Apparently he sent it out on Thursday.

About one on Thursday I got a call from a woman who wanted to look at our trailer. I said she could come, and spent the next 20 minutes cleaning the house so it looked presentable. She looked at it, then asked the all-important question--would we be willing to finance. I told her at the time we were not considering it. She promptly left.

A few hours later I received another call from a man who wanted to come look at the trailer. I tidied again, and he showed up, looked around and seemed interested, and left.

An hour after the man left, he called again, asking if he could come look at the trailer AGAIN. I agreed, and he showed up, and started looking at things more in depth--any sort of crack in the wall, the ceiling, the bathtub wall, etc. After about 10 minutes he asked me a couple of questions, then suddenly announced, "I'm going to do it. I'm going to buy it. I don't want to do this offer then counter-offer deal, how much do you want for it?" We I was a little shocked. Tyson wasn't at all. He seemed to be expecting to sell our house in a day, you know. We told him what we hoped for the house and he agreed. He had already been approved for affordable housing since he was looking at a couple of other trailers previously, and he has enough in savings to pay in cash. The next day he came over with paper work and we signed the preliminary agreement and he made a payment of earnest money--and that was that. 

Even though it's sold, we won't close on the trailer until mid summer, but the buyer is still excited and already working on fixing things on the outside and yard (like trying to get a shed installed) while we wait.

And where are we moving to, you might ask? We have no idea. All we know is that Tyson is graduating next week and we're looking for a job teaching Spanish at a Jr. College--which would not be here. So while we don't know where we are going, we knew that it's time to move on. And it would be nice to have a little more space than 520 square feet for our soon-to-be family of six ;)

Anyways, the whole reason behind this post was because I mentioned redoing the kids closet. Their room is EXTREMELY small (about 8x6 feet) so it's hard to get a decent picture especially with the beds in the way. But here are the before pictures:

The silly board down the middle dividing the closet seriously had no purpose other than to be in my way. Living in such a small area means we need to utilize every space possible, and we needed to put things there. But it was really difficult to get anything behind it, and since Jacob's crib is in front of half the closet , then the back (the opening on the far right) wasn't accessible to me either. Drove me nuts. 

So I finally took Tyson's circular saw and hacked it off. 

These are the after pictures. . .taken today, at least two months after I hacked out the wood :) I was intending to put up a nice curtain or something in front of the whole closet to make it look nicer for buyers, but since it sold so quickly I decided to throw that idea out the window and save myself the hassle. 

FYI, we do not have a model home. I do clean out the kids room really well every week, but today was not that day (I usually do it Thursday). It's especially impossible to keep the bookshelf organized since Jacob reaches through his crib bars at nap time and pulls them off.

SO MUCH BETTER! I can finally access the bookshelf and hangers and toy box below the hangers!

And below is the kids room so you get an idea of the little space there is in there--I'm just outside the door, and that floorspace you see is all there is. The doorway to get in is just a little over a foot wide.

Can you tell why it would be hard to get to that bookshelf when that slab of wood was in the middle and Jacob's crib in the way? Now I can step into the closet and reach it

BYU blanket just makes the room darker for their naptime--you know, the sacred two hours of peace I get in my day ;)
I know it looks so nice, we are just classy people that way!