The House

Being a military family and dragging your kids into another move every few years has it's ups and downs. You learn not to get too attached to places, houses, even people. I know that sounds horrible. Every move you try to figure out who is there at the next duty station, so you know you already have friends in the area.

We were getting SO excited to see some of our best closest friends go back to Iwakuni, my heart was just bursting with joy. This would be our IWAKUNIUNION!!!! YESSS!

There is a lot that goes into the overseas moving process, of course. We applied for passports for our little ones, because even though we are supposed to get free military passports issued, no one answers the darn phone. Knowing it was a lengthy process, we just bit the bullet and applied for regular ones.

Of course.....the house. We thought about renting it out for a moment, but only ONE MOMENT.

I honestly could NOT deal with the idea of dealing with a rental property while overseas. Time to sell. And.....the market was JUST RIGHT.

It took us a few weeks to take things off of walls, patch any nail holes, touch up trim, Kevin came up and helped stain our back deck. Mom and Kevin also brought Scout home with them afterwards so we wouldn't have to deal with a dog during the selling process too. They also graciously agreed to house him for our time away in Japan.

We pulled everything together, hired some landscaper cleanup service, and I grabbed the kids and headed down to my moms house the morning our house hit the market.

Greg stayed in the area with CC, since she was still at homeschool community when I left with the other kids, and also to help Greg tidy up and get the house ready for showing every morning. And to keep the poor guy company.

We kept a few cameras in our house, and made it known there were cameras to all the buyers who came to see the house. Let me tell you........it's SO WEIRD having TONS of people in your house without you.

One of the reasons I took the kids out of the area was because we are not allowed in the home during showings, and our house was booked through the weekend.

I wasn't constantly watching the cameras, it actually made me more anxious. But it was nice to know who was in my house. There were some times I had to rely on my neighbors heavily....like when the UPS guy delivered a package! Or....when one buyer left our back sliding door WIDE OPEN.

By the end of the weekend, we had four offers, all of them above asking price.

Before we had listed the house, we had a private appraisal done, just to figure out what to list it at. We decided to list it HIGH, about 40K above the appraisal, just to see, since we listed early and had a little time to sell the house. So when we were going through the offers, we were really hoping for one that would waive the appraisal. No such luck, though.

The offer we ended up choosing was not the highest. In fact there was another offer that came in a little later that was '$2,000 more than the highest offer'. The offer we accepted, however, was simply the best offer for personal reasons. And...they waived the inspection, so less stress for me!

With our home under contract, we immediately. began contacting DMO to schedule the pack out. Since it's an overseas move, we are REQUIRED to use the military contracted moving company. Usually we could have the choice to move ourselves, but not for an overseas move. Greg put in the request, and we were at the mercy of our case manager. We were assigned a case manager fairly quickly. We actually had two. For overseas, we get an express shipment, household goods, and long term storage. Express is everything you want to get there quickly....clothes, kitchen items, ALL MY FABRIC AND MACHINES, etc. Household goods is furniture stuff, and everything else. Long term storage is because we're going to a place where the houses are much smaller and we need to store some things we might not need.....garage tools, extra furniture, etc. One of our case managers was in charge of our express shipment, the other was in charge of the household goods and storage.

As time went on, we heard from our express shipment case manager pretty quickly, and got that scheduled just fine. We waited and waited for the other case manager to call. Getting anxious, Greg called him and was told "YOU'RE IN THE QUEUE"....basically, DON'T CALL US WE'LL CALL YOU. So we waited.

Meanwhile, I got Edens blood draw done just to see where her numbers were at. The head hematologist from Walter Reed called to let me know that her neutrophil count, which is normally around 200-300 (normal count is 1500), finally jumped up to 1300! Her body is finally coming through the Chronic Benign Neutropenia! With those counts, he was able to confidently tell me we have been released from having to go to an ER with any fever, no more urgent care or special protocol! YAY EDEN!!

As we got closer and closer to our closing date on the house, we started getting more and more concerned that no one was calling to schedule our pack out....the one we are REQUIRED to use for overseas. We asked for a possible extension, but since we didn't even have an estimate at how long until our pack out would be, it was difficult. It was decided no anyways, because our buyer was selling a house and had to get out of it and into his new house (our house) the same day as closing day.

The day of the appraisal came....this was our anxiety about the house. We were now at 50k over what it was initially appraised for. We prayed it would appraise well, or we might have to go back to the drawing board.

Time and deadlines were racing, and we felt like we were scrambling. With no call from our case manager, and no one answering the phones, we realized that no one was coming to pack out our house before closing.

-Happy Sewing!!

Shelley