I'm always amazed at how quickly time goes by. It seems every time I turn around another 3 weeks has passed since my last blog post!! Will try and do better about keeping up. I mean, it's certainly not for a lack of things to share. Since the last post we've had two more birthdays (Katie's 20th and Kristi's 16th) and we also made a big decision about our house.
Jim and I were both pretty excited about the idea of downsizing and fast-forwarding our plans for an eventual lake place. So we priced our home somewhat realistically to start (about 10% off 2007 values) . . . or so we thought. Well, the price brought in a handful of showings - so it must have been 'fair' at the very least. But things weren't moving as quickly as we'd have liked so we did the updates mentioned earlier (hardwood and appliances), and as further incentive we dropped the price $30,000 in hopes of enticing a quick sale . . . and were unpleasantly surprised to have the showings drop off along with our price.
So after a few weeks of practically no showings we finally decided to drop the price another $23,000 - which put us within about $10,000 of our bottom that we were willing to take. Of course this would bring some buyers in, right? Wrong. Nada. Seriously not one phone call. So rather than continue to kick ourselves, we finally looked deeper into the market and realized that the statistics spoke for themselves. Of the 22 homes in our school district in a $200,000 range around our home's value that had come off the market in the previous month, only 2 had sold. Two additional homes were 'pending' and the other 18 had expired or canceled the listings. And of those sold and/or pending, I'm willing to bet most if not all were bank owned, and selling at a 30% discount. Bottom line, having the house on the market proved to be an exercise in futility.
The good news? There's really nothing about this house I don't like - it's just a little too big for our lives at this point. But it's now also clean, repair-free, updated and de-cluttered. Which makes it much easier to keep clean. So, there IS a silver lining in every cloud! And now that everything here is in order, I can once again turn my attention back to my studio and some new art - after all the holidays are approaching quickly, too!
Quite frankly, if the recent weather here is an indicator of what this winter is 
going to be like, I'm feeling VERY thankful we're not moving . . . check out this porch scene out from a week or so ago . . . brrrrrrrrr!
So be on the look out for new art, and (finally!) some contest winners in the weeks ahead. Maybe even some spontaneous winners . . . peek back often and you may be one of them :)
