Our house is OFF THE MARKET

Since our house hadn't sold, nor were we getting any showings, Clay and I were making arrangements to do some renovations to our house instead. On Wednesday, May 28, out of the blue, our realtor called to say that we had an offer. Nobody had even looked at our house in 2+ months so we couldn't understand who would make an offer. She said that there was a military couple from Alberta being posted here and they loved our house online and wanted to guarantee that it would still be here for them to look at on Friday. Their first offer was a good one. It was actually our bottom line and that is the price where they were starting from. Clay and I debated that evening whether we would even counter the offer since we had made the renovation plans, but we decided to counter since we figured if we could get lots of money for the house, then we might as well try. So we countered on Thursday morning. The couple arrived Friday morning to look at our house and loved it. The countered our offer and by 12:30, we had agreed on a price. And it was $5,000 more than our bottom line. We were pretty excited....until the next day, when the home inspector came.

So Saturday afternoon, Clay and I are out looking at new houses being built to get ideas for siding colours and window styles, etc. and we get a phone call from our realtor. She says that the home inspection went very badly (and our house is in very good condition) so we couldn't figure out what could possibly have happened. There really wasn't much, but the little things he did find, he made mountains out of them. He stepped over the boundaries of his job description from home inspector to contractor and he gave the couple estimated costs to fix some of the problems. And he blew them way out of proportion. One of the issues was that there had been water seepage under out deck so the boards and studs were rotting. He told them that the deck would have to be torn down and rebuilt, the wall would have to be repaired, the patio door replaced, etc., to the tune of $23,000! So that is what they dropped their price by. I laughed on the phone to our realtor and said "No way!" Then they wouldn't give us any time to find our own contractors to get accurate quotations to fix it. I gave them our bottom line price and told them to take it or leave because I wasn't wasting contractors' time on the weekends to come out to our place if the buyers were just going to walk. They came back and said that they were backing out. Clay and I took this as our sign that we should take our house off the market and continue on with our renovation plans. (And by the way, the following Monday/Tuesday we fixed all the boards and studs under our deck, replaced our patio doors all without tearing our deck down, and for less than $2,000. Oh well, their loss.)