hiccups

Ironically, I had a pretty bad case of the hiccups last night on the way home from dinner and we were having a good laugh about that.  One of my friends from San Antonio was in town for work and he took us and our friend Heather out to a really fun dinner in Boystown.  I'm so glad we got to do that, it was another thing that I hadn't put on the bucket list but still wanted to do.  I didn't take any pictures though.

Sadly, we're having a few more hiccups with the condo sale/realty switch that are not really bloggable.  Just know that it's been really stressful and upsetting.  I feel like I came into this home sale with a fairly realistic attitude.  And by realistic, I kind of mean pessimistic.  I know that for me personally, this is not a home I would buy and I feel like I can identify all of our weaknesses that people pick on (size, non-existant kitchen, very small living space due to the weird layout, etc.).  However, numbers don't lie and when I look in our price range in our neighborhood, there are no other two bedroom units on the market.  Everything else is a one bedroom and priced higher than us.  It doesn't explain why we've had such a small amount of traffic.  We're stretched to the limit and priced as low as we can go, which I believe is an aggressive price and we just need a realtor that is on board with that and will move this unit.  Due to some money, potential contract and other issues, we're still on the market with our original realtor as of this morning.  At this point, the time is every bit as important as the money and it has both Adam and I tied up in knots.

It's hard to celebrate a big move that we've been working towards for almost a year when the details aren't falling into place.  We're in a rough spot and I wouldn't wish this home sale on my enemies.  I've learned so many valuable lessons.  We'll never buy again without a very sizable down payment.  I want to know we have the security of having a great deal of equity put in from the start in case we ever see property values plummet again.  Our next place will provide us with room to go, rather than being a place we outgrew from the moment I moved in.   It will have entertaining space so that we don't have to go out to eat to see our friends.  This is all going to be quite a few years down the road so we can have time to recover from this both financially and mentally.  I'm totally ok with being renters for the time being.  I'm ready for this skewed version of the American Dream (in our case nightmare) to be over.