We looked around at houses in Naperville, Wheaton, Glen Ellyn, Geneva and St Charles and decided we wouldn't have any problem finding something we would like. Our main criteria was the ability to walk to the downtown area. In this market we decided to take my advice to work on our house sale first.
We spent some time thinking about what it would take to get it ready, if you have the luxury of time it's generally best to think ahead if you are thinking of selling.. So that's what we did. This lead to a series of professional and homeowner projects that seemed daunting at fitrst, but really came together.
In addition to all of the normal things we also spent some money updating the baths in the house. We escalated the timeline on this because we were hosting many out of town guests for almost a week during the summer for my son's wedding, this involved some pre-staging and we brought in our expert.
Needless to say, we put our house on the market towards the end of October, and sold in two weeks. In some markets that might not be a big deal but in my neighborhood there were homes sitting on the market for a year or more, while I expected to sell in a reasonable amount of time... I wanted to get a good $.
Bang! Good, reasonable buyer, paying a good price and suddenly a seller that doesn't know where he wants to go.
The next day one our tenants tells us that they have to move, so we line up all of our contractors again and go to work on that property.. we have moved into it, but we aren't getting that walk to town benefit so we are actively out looking now.
I'm assuming that when we get to the end house we'll need to do things to make it the way we like it... I'll breathe a big sigh of relief when we are done with that.
Moo in Naperville
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