Our Rental House - Unstaged

So one week last fall we had an offer on our rental house. After going back and forth over the price, we were all set to accept their counter, when the buyer withdrew their offer. We were pretty bummed. Two days later, they offered again. Needless to say, I stayed in the valley late to sign papers before driving over to duck camp for the weekend to be with the rest of the family.

Fast forward about a month and a half. It was two weeks until when we were supposed to close. I knew it was perhaps unlikely that we would close on time, because the sale was contingent on the buyer's house closing, and her closing was taking a bit longer than hoped. I started writing a post on how we were two weeks from closing, when my husband walked in the door from work talking about how closing was going to be later than expected. I decided to wait on the post until things seemed more sure.

A week later, just under a week from when we were supposed to close, the sale fell through on her house, so by default, our sale fell through. We had a bunch of difficult reality-checks in early December, and that was one of them.

However, we've moved on. On Christmas eve, the mother of the local fire chief had her house burn down. The house that she raised her 7 kids in. Talk about a truly crazy unfortunate reality check... Luckily no one was hurt, and other than water and smoke damage, a lot of her possessions are salvageable. The firemen were very diligent and managed to save the structure, but the insurance company is still deciding whether to total her house or whether gutting and rebuilding it will be the way to go.

She needed a place to live, and since her house was just down the street and around the corner from ours, she's moved in to our rental for a couple months until her house situation gets figured out. Turns out her daily walking route used to go right by our house, so the transition will be as easy as any such transition could be. She's a really sweet old lady and we are feeling pretty lucky to be able to help her out while helping our finances out at the same time! I'm still hopeful that our house will still sell this summer, but am not expecting anything in the months to come.

I know I never shared the fully staged house photos I had planned, because we weren't completely done our fix-ups and staging when we accepted that offer last fall, so the pictures in this post were taken shortly before we un-staged it prior to our new renter moving in last weekend, so you could see how nice it was looking :)