Two things that summed up May 2021: Selling our house and Covid-19!
We wanted to list our house to sell by May 14, so the first step was decluttering and packing up anything that we wouldn't need for a month or so. Wes and Joyce left for Ohio, so we took all the boxes to their garage before the showings.
I don't even know...
Ben and I also worked through the "Hope for the Journey" conference (formerly known as "Empowered to Connect" conference) every Sunday afternoon. It's so nice that it was online because of COVID so we could walk through it on our own time table.
Cleaning and organizing! It's amazing how nice rooms can look when they are actually clean and decluttered!
I was trying to get a picture of them in the same pose, but I was a second too late. It looks like teenage Ben and middle-age Ben side by side.
Bowling! Micah and Ben went to a teen group gathering at the Thompson's house, so I took Abby and Caleb bowling. (Because I can be a fun parent too!) Little did I realize that this was probably where Caleb caught Corona! (Ben and I had had our second vaccine shots and we were just a few days short of them being fully effective. The mask mandate had been lifted in Rock Hill. The kids weren't able to be vaccinated yet, but usually Corona in kids is pretty mild... so we got sloppy and went someplace that was crowded and probably pretty germy.) Even if they did catch a virus, they sure had fun! 😬
Score of the first game. (We played two games... I ended up winning both, but for a while, Caleb was legitimately winning the second game!)
Caleb is the only one who made a strike all night, so he wanted to be called "Striker."
This picture makes me laugh because he was just starting to crinkle his nose in order to push his glasses up. ;)
Mother's Day... Caleb and Abby set their alarms to get up and make me a big breakfast before church!
We went bowling on the Friday before Mother's Day. On Tuesday morning, May 11, Caleb woke up with a mild fever (101) and a bad headache. So Ben stayed home from work, and I took Caleb to get tested. The fever went away (although he might have had a low one Tuesday night while he slept too.) By Wednesday morning, we got the results. Ben was all packed and ready to go to work because we really thought it would be nothing since his fever was already gone, and he was almost normal. It was a little bit of an "Uh oh" moment when we saw he was positive for Covid because we were scheduled to be out of the house all weekend for showings. We had planned to move into Wes and Joyc'es house Thursday night and let there be showings Friday-Sunday. After talking to our realtor, we decided to move into Wes and Joyce's house one day early (on Wednesday) so the kids would be out of the house over 24 hours before people came in. I went over and super-cleaned and sanitized on Thursday. The timing actually worked out pretty well! Besides headaches that Caleb kept at bay with some medicine, and a slight cough, he had hardly any symptoms for about 5 days. Abby and Micah started with some mild symptoms on Friday. We got them tested (and myself tested). Their tests came back positive, and mine was negative. Ben tested on Monday and his was negative too. Looked like the vaccine worked! Micah probably had the most symptoms, although still mild - headaches, feeling a little more tired for a few days, a slight cough. He said he could mostly tell when he would go for a run that his lungs were not 100%. With Ben's negative test and being fully vaccinated, he was able to go back to work, and he and I could go out and do a little furniture shopping, but the kids quarantined for 10 days from the start of their symptoms, even though they felt fine long before that. In some ways it was fantastic, because with Micah unable to go anywhere, he went crazy packing up the house after we were under contract! 😆
Enjoying our flat backyard while we can! Abby took an interest in softball since Becca Zieber plays it.
My pretty flowerbeds that I'm about to leave behind!
Ben was pretty nervous about ordering carpet before we actually closed on the house, but I really wanted to get the carpet scheduled before we had to move into it, so when we saw this moving POD outside the new house, Ben gave the okay to order carpet. :)
Working from "home" is a rough life! Even though he was vaccinated, Ben couldn't go back to work until he had a negative test result.
House for sale!
So here is how the sale of the house went. Our realtor put up pictures on Wednesday morning listed as "coming soon." We had appointments available starting Friday at 8 AM and going until noon on Sunday. Within minutes, people started making appointments and Friday was booked full quickly. Thursday night (before anyone had even seen the house and it was "live"), we got our first offer. It was good, but not super amazing, so we passed on it. (A quick run-down: we bought this house for $94,500 back in fall of 2014. One year ago, we would have estimated that we could sell it for maybe $140,000 at the most, and that seeemed like a stretch. But because of the way the market changed this past year with Corona, there is so much demand for houses right now that our realtor wanted to list our house for $230,000, anticipating that we would have a bidding war above that.) By Thursday evening, we had FIFTY-FOUR showings booked for the weekend. Friday and Saturday were back-to-back packed with 15 minute and half hour time slots. It was insane. Friday evening, our realtor called with the updates from that day. He said he had never in his long career EVER had as many calls and emails about a single listing. (Felt like the favor of the Lord!) By Friday evening, we had 9 official offers and he knew he would get more the next day, BUT one of them was so good, he advised us to take the offer and go under contract right away instead of waiting it out and possibly losing that offer. So that's what we did. The offer was for $245,000 ($15,000 over asking price.) We actually had a couple offers that were for $250,000, but our realtor wasn't sure the house would appraise for $250,000, and those offers were from people who had FHA loans or contigencies that weren't as good. The offer we accepted was contigent on financing, but it was a conventional loan they had been preapproved for, and they signed a $15,000 appraisal addendum (so even if the house appraised for $15,000 below what they could get a loan for, they would come up with that $15,000 themselves, and we wouldn't lose any money.) They wanted an inspection, but were buying "as-is" so anything found in the inspection would be their responsibility to fix. AND they put down $8,000 earnest money, which was significantly more than anyone else, so that told us they were pretty serious, because for them to back out, we would keep that $8,000. Plus, they wrote a very sweet "love letter" sharing their story with us. Once we were under contract, instead of canceling all the other showings, we let people decide if they still wanted to come see it incase our current contract fell through. Most people canceled, but there were still quite a few who walked through, and we enjoyed the rest of our "vacation" at the Kaufman house for the rest of the weekend. We moved back into our house Sunday evening.
Our housing story is almost unheard of in this market... to get a house on our first try (the second house we walked through) and then to sell so quickly and easily with so many options to choose from. We're hoping this means that our Haiti twins are destined to come home earlier than expected too! 😃
Right after the kids' quarantine was over, we had to get out of our house two days in a row: once for inspection, once for appraisal. We did some trips to Target for Starbucks and to pick out some house stuff, the bookstore, lunch at the Ziebers... it was so nice to just leave the house with everyone!
Closing on our house is scheduled for June 14, which meant moving day should be June 12. Good thing we picked out carpet when we did because the earliest they could schedule installation was June 11! The couches we picked out are tentatively scheduled for delivery the week after we move in. (Another issue because of Corona and the supply chain being affected all over the world this year... furniture takes forever to come in! Just ordering premade, standard items takes about 2 months to be available. Anything in a custom color/style is more like 8 months. It took some looking, but Ben and I found something we think we'll love that wasn't pushed out horribly far.)
Now we can start REALLY packing and doing other projects. We painted this desk and the side-table from the living room to go in Abby's room. We also sold our queen bed frame (painting it was going to be a beast!) and bought Abby a queen bedframe.
Micah was amazing in the packing! Our first day back from the Kaufmans, while I cleaned the Kaufman house, he and Caleb and Abby emptied the attic! I sold a few things on Facebook marketplace, and we took tons to a thrift store in town. The rest of what we don't need immediately is getting put in the garage.
Ben and I also picked out a king-size bed! (Making room for all 5 kids to crawl in!) The plan had always been to get rid of Abby's queen matress (which is in really bad shape) and give her our mattress. (Which will also be the guest bedroom when anyone comes.) With our bigger bedroom, a king bed will be perfect! After 3 stores, we found a mattress we liked that was a good price. It was "buy a king for a queen price" weekend AND at the last minute, the sales lady was like, "OH! I forgot... the mattress you picked ha s a promotion right now where you can get an adjustable bed frame (the kind that sits up) for free!" That's not something we were really interested in, BUT it actually would save us $450 from buying a box spring... so now we will have an adjustable bed too! 😆
Last day of quarantine, we went to Westminister Park to just play around on a soccer field. We spied this nest on one of the big lights. At first, we thought it was an eagle, but I think it was actually an osprey or hawk of some kind.
Laughing because I licked my finger and tried to smooth down an eyebrow. :)
A cool view from Ben's office of a storm rolling in...
Brother-sister snuggles: :)
Baking cookies and listening to tunes... it's how he rolls!
Checking out furniture while looking for a new bedframe for Abby...
So many decisions! I think our new house will be 50 shades of gray. 😆
The last Sunday evening of the month, Micah and Ben went golfing, and Abby spent the night at the Zieber's house. So Caleb and I had the evening to ourselves! Jimmy Johns, putt-putt, and Freddy's ice cream... it was a good date! 😃
When it was time to put together bags of cookies, Ben told Alexa to play "No Diggity"... once again, I was just a bit too late to catch Ben's amazing signing/dancing skills! 😆
Here are the professional pictures that were done of our house. With pictures like this, no wonder we had so much interest in our house!! (Not sure why the pictures loaded all out of order here...)
In other news, the twins turned TWO in Haiti this month! We got to have a Zoom call with them (but can't post pictures or videos yet.) It was wonderful to see them actually walking a little bit! The creche worker said that they will also mimic words (like if they call a child's name, M&M will try saying it too), and if someone else cries, they act like they are crying too. They are SO adorable, and it makes me all the more eager to get them home!!!
Other May items: We got to watch Beth Zieber in the play, "Murder on the Menu", Ben played in a golf tournament for the Children's Attention Home, and Micah took the CLT-8 standardized test, scoring in the 91st perecentile overall. (Funny story: the day before, I told him to take one of the practice tests. He was REALLY sweating it when he took the practice test because it was so hard - lots of stuff he had never even learned yet. It wasn't until he was done that I realized he took a practice test for the actual CLT (which is like SAT/ACT... designed for graduating seniors.) What a relief when we figured that out! Even still, his practice CLT would have been the equivalent of a score of 20 on the ACT, and that's pretty good for an 8th grader!
Also kind of cool... we wanted to meet outside for church in April and May before going back inside in June (because of COVID.) Even though there were several Saturdays and Mondays that had rain, EVERY Sunday was beautiful weather... not even a close-call on whether we should move indoors or not! That's nine straight weeks of beautiful weather to meet in local parks! Thank you, Jesus!
Memorial Day flag football crew:
