Thoughts on Selling Our First Home (pt. 2)

  
About six weeks ago, we met with a realtor and then a staging expert to figure out what we needed to do to get our house ready to sell. These past six weeks have been a ton of work, overwhelming, exhausting, challenging, refreshing, exciting, and rewarding. We took all of the suggestions of the stager, including new paint colors in the living room and our bedroom, rearranging furniture, getting rid of a lot of extra stuff, packing most of our things away, organizing closets and other spaces, getting our bathroom tub refinished, cleaning our carpets, taking down any personal photos of the walls, adding some decor and plants, putting in a new bathroom door, taking down curtains in certain rooms, putting away any kid items except for in Charlie's room, adding new bedding in our room, removing extra furniture, building shelves in a closet to convert it it to a pantry, shining the floors, touching up paint, and just general decluttering. Oh, and we decided to build another bedroom in the basement too. So there's that.

I will say, Dan and I are not the most organized or neat people in the world. We are also not the greatest at decorating. So, this whole "project" was challenging for us, yet we are also really enjoying our newly staged home! We have said to each other, "Why didn't we do this a long time ago?" more than a couple of times during the process. It has been fun to see everything come together. And now, we are only a few days away from listing. Trying to keep our house organized and clean for showings with a three year old and and six month old is not the most stress free situation. I'm sure the past six weeks were doubled by the fact that every time I organized something or put it away, Charlie would have it out again within minutes. Or the fact that Norah was screaming for days over teething, where all I could do was hold her and stare at the incredibly long list of "to do's" in front of me. But we have accomplished so much in only six weeks!

Now we are having professional pictures taken of our house on Monday and listing on Tuesday. I can hardly believe it! It's exciting, yet also scary in some ways. Besides having to keep our house super clean and tidy for showings and having to potentially interrupt nap times, removing the kids from the house quickly while I'm home alone with them, etc, we also need to somehow find another home to buy once we get an offer on this one. And we need to do it quickly before closing, so that we aren't homeless. How in the world do people do this? We've experienced already the frustration of making a contingent offer on a house (contingent on the sale of ours) when there are other interested buyers. Yet even when we do have an offer on our home, and even if we find a house we love, there are almost always bidding wars, it seems. This is how we can start to feel anxious and hopeless.

It's funny how easily we forget what the Lord has done for us in the past and that we can still somehow worry that we will be taken care of in the future. I think of the Israelites wandering around in the dessert who so easily forgot the miracles and provision of God, "He struck the rock so that water gushed out and streams overflowed. Can he also give bread or provide meat for his people?" (Psalm 78:20). After looking at 80 houses and offering on six different ones, the Lord led us to the home we are in now that we have loved and are grateful for. But here I am again, five years later wondering if we will find a house that is right for us in a short time once we (Lord willing) have an offer on this house. How unlikely it is that we will find a house we love and that we can also hopefully stay in for a long time, in a matter of about a month, when for the past six weeks there have been only two houses we have been remotely interested in come on the market? Yet, I know that we needn't worry about the logistics. If God has picked out a house for us, it is waiting for us. Competitive offers on houses make me so anxious. I feel like we'll never "win" the house we want...but we won't have to. God will set it aside for us. I'm writing this out to remind myself, but could you pray with us that God would provide a home for us that we could use for growing our family and ministering to others for His glory and our joy?