My Real Estate Nightmare (Part 1)

So I've been pretty distracted for the past couple of months. For those of you who tune into my blog now and again, you may have noticed that I've been on hiatus. The real issue is that my family and I have been living in hell.

It all started back in February when on a whim, my wife and I decided to start cruising around Dollard-des-Ormeaux to look for what might potentially be our new house. We had decided that our previous home in the Bois Franc area, was getting to be a little tight, especially with my son Ethan being so vivacious. We were also fully aware that this was going to be a starter home for us, and had planned to stay in it for only 3-4 years. So that time had arrived.

It turns out that after only visiting 3 or 4 houses, we landed upon a true gem. The house ended up being exactly what we were looking for. Central air, double-garage, beautiful backyard, the works. And immaculate. The owners had also invested roughly $30-$40,000 in new windows, double insulation, and what not, in order to improve the house's energy rating. Long story short, we made an offer on the place about 3 days later, and after a bit of haggling, settled on a reasonable price.

Being the cautious guy that I am, we instated a clause specifying that we needed to sell our house first prior to finalizing the Promise to Purchase. We had 30 days to do so. And the race was on.

The first week we listed our property saw roughly 30 people dissect our home. The first open house we had saw roughly 75 more. The house had TONS of traffic, but no offers. 30 days was just around the corner and we were stressed. We were terrified at the prospect of losing our new home. "There'll be others" we were being told, but not to us. We wanted our house, and we just kept visualizing ourselves in there.

Then the 30 days passed. In the only good piece of news in this whole ordeal, the sellers had agreed to give us an extension, particularly since they hadn't yet found their new home. So this extension was granted for another 30 days.

It turns out that 10 days after we were granted the extension, we received our first offer! We were ecstatic, and mostly relieved, in that we were beginning to believe that our house just wouldn't sell. So the bargaining began, and we finally settled on a reasonable price. At that point, we were more relieved to have sold our old home, and that we were ready to receive our new one.

Or so we thought...