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Home of Jason Johnston
Saturday, September 08, 2007
Catching Up, Part II: Home
Last year sometime Julie and I got the idea in our heads that we wanted to move out of the 'burbs and close to downtown Denver. There are a lot of motivations behind it, including a desire to be able to walk places, easier access to cultural events, and a simpler, less wasteful lifestyle in general. It's definitely not been an easy decision, and we've gone back and forth on it many times. We do love our house -- I mean, we hand-picked most everything about it to suit us when it was built -- and there are a lot of things about the suburbs that are convenient and appealing. But it comes down to the fact that when we imagine our life five or ten years down the road, this isn't the lifestyle we see.
So we finally got up the guts to go for it, and after several weeks of decluttering and organizing and cleaning and decorating we put our house on the market. We chose a listing price that would allow us to break even, and have had what I understand is a decent number of showings for this area and the current housing market. Unfortunately we haven't received any offers in about four months. It's been a bit frustrating, not so much the lack of offers itself but more just being in a state of limbo; not knowing if we're going to be able to sell and move or have to stay put for a while has really been difficult to deal with.
We actually tried a few weeks ago to take it off the market but decided to keep it listed at least through October to ride out the contract with our realtor. And just this past week we decided to try dropping the asking price, just a little bit so we won't be taking a big loss, to try and spark some last-minute interest. Personally I'm still feeling hopeful but not very optimistic; it's no secret that the housing market is, well, sucking pretty hard right now. We'll know pretty quickly if this price drop makes any difference.
And even if nothing comes of it and we have to stay here for a while, we've still got a beautiful home in a decent neighborhood with lots of open space trails nearby, and if nothing else this process has forced us to get the house cleaned up and keep it that way. And that's no small thing.
