Offer Accepted?

So after a month and a half of the grueling, nerve damaging, stomach aching, sleep reducing, awful house hunting process, we finally got an offer accepted!!!! It was house number three (is this not totally the show house hunters on HGTV?). We submitted the offer on a Wednesday and didn't hear back until the next Wednesday! And let me tell you the waiting process was nerve wrenching.

**time out**

Nerve wrenching, Adam? :-) Haven't heard that expression before! Anyway, since Adam has yet to finish up his post, I am totally butting in and finishing it for him since I am too excited for this to stay bottled inside much longer. I have to shout it from the rooftops (even though, really, no one is down there listening besides... well... us!).  I'll get back to that...

So we wrote our offer on the 30th, and man, did they keep us waiting! We were under the impression that you usually hear back within a couple of days, but apparently the sellers are getting a divorce so getting them together in one spot proved difficult for the listing agent (and perhaps helped us in the long run?). I really feel terrible that they're getting divorced, even though of course it isn't any of my business. Right in the entry way there are two pictures - one is of their wedding day, and the other must be more recent, since they look to be elderly. The nosy nelly that I am feels bad for them and wonders how people get divorced that late in life, especially after such a long marriage. Then again, who knows if the couple in those photographs was even them?! Maybe it's family. Or maybe they like old people? Maybe I'll just butt out...

Back to the waiting game. We knew they would be meeting on June 6 in the evening to "discuss" our offer. When we hadn't heard back by Thursday morning, we thought we were going to combust. But lo and behold, around lunch time our fabulous Realtor called Adam and said she had some great news for us. So Adam hung up on her.

Haha! Well, he hung up to try to call me and 3-way so that I could hear whatever the great news was at once with him, but he couldn't get his office phone to call, so he hung up on me (at my insistence!) to call her back. I sat there waiting for 10 minutes, nervously biting my lip in anticipation of whatever good news was coming. Did they just accept?! Did we get a counter? Gah!!

Yes, they countered. But not on price (whew!) but on terms. Instead of the 45 day escrow they wanted a 30 day, and they wanted to change possession from COE (close of escrow) to COE+1 day. And, I believe they didn't want to pay for the termite inspection. All those things were so not a big deal, so we happily signed away our acceptance!

We received word on Monday that the package has been submitted to the bank, so now we just wait on for the next dreaded step of the short sale process. We'd ideally LOVE for it to lag on until October. That gives us more time to save money for all the exciting changes we want to make to the house (wood floors, what!?). With the norm being anywhere from 3 months to a year, we're really not sure what to expect. A year just sounds like a depressingly long amount of time to wait, so hopefully it's more like the 4 months-ish ideal I've decided on in my head. We always tend to move around Halloween time, so it would totally make sense that it would happen that way now too, right?! Positive thinking, positive thinking...