Farewell Ballard, it's been real.

It seems like just yesterday that we were excitedly moving into our Ballard condo. But here we are, four years later, ready to move on again.

We've had our unit up for sale for about three months, and having it on the market has been an extremely exhausting and frustrating process. We got a low offer offer just a few days after our listing went live, but our agent managed to negotiate it up a bit to something we were comfortable with. We had a quick evening meeting to sign the paperwork and the next morning I started looking into temporary apartment rentals. This may have been what jinxed us. We got a call a few hours later saying that the buyer had backed out and was no longer interested unless we were willing to lower the price. Since we had been on the market for less than a week at that point, we declined.

For the next couple months we had a TON of showings every week, and a lot of interested parties, but no more offers. By December I was starting to get worried that the condo would never sell. But we were reluctant to panic and drop the price, because neighborhood comparables just didn't warrant it. So we decided to hang tight and even keep the listing live over the holidays, thinking someone may want to check it out.

We lucked out and the right buyer came along over Christmas, and after a couple weeks of price and inspection negotiations, our condo sale is officially "pending" and set to close on or before March 15! Barring an act of god (or the bad luck of writing this blog post), there's no legal way for the buyer to back out at this point. And we managed to just about break even, which in today's market I feel is pretty darn good. We originally bought the unit as an investment and planned to make money on it in the future, but the great recession really put a cramp in that plan. Boo.

As excited as I am about our new house, I'll still be sad to move out of the home where Stew and I first built a life together. I'll also miss Ballard (but not commuting in and out of it) and I'll miss some of our lovely neighbors (but not the aggressive street people).

Our sweet neighbor down the hall left us
this note when she heard the news.

So it's almost time for a new chapter. And it's definitely time to stop waking up 30 minutes earlier every morning to clean the entire house and put it in show condition before I leave for the day... I definitely won't miss that.

And the countdown begins... I guess I'll start packing!