Doomsday Averted

The single biggest missing piece of our move appears to have fallen in place--we received, renegotiated and ultimately accepted an offer on the house on Wednesday! Just over two weeks on the market. A woman who attended the open house on Saturday (one of two parties that showed up during the three hours--how's that for a slow market?) apparently fell in love with it (just like we did) at first sight. She spent over an hour casing the joint, including an all-important 30 minutes talking to upstairs neighbor Gayle, understandably to evaluate their potential compatibility and get the low-down on the neighborhood. Fortunately they hit it off just fine. The poor woman apparently toured 20 places all over creation in Chicago this weekend, thinking she'd prefer the South Loop (sorta the opposite of Roscose Village) then woke up Monday morning deciding she still loved our place best.

So we're set for a November 15 close; she's pre-approved and the financing appears solid; we're in fast forward mode with the inspection already on Friday. We really couldn't expect things to look any better.

The absolutely crazy thing is that Steph and I are responding exactly the same to this wonderful news--without any joy whatsoever. To "celebrate", we met for a glass(es) of wine on Wednesday night at our local wine bar, as I was returning from a business trip and she from her going-away work-friends dinner that evening (at Nine, incidentally). By our demeanor at the bar, you're more likely to have thought that the house collapsed instead of sold at exactly the price we wanted. And our dour mood certainly wasn't the wine's fault, it was awesome--a Spanish txocoli (some crazy white varietal) and a nice Oregon pinot noir.

So why is that? I guess I don't know exactly (my psychology career ended abruptly after Psych 101 in college due to insufficient electives for engineering majors). Maybe because the market still really stinks and we've heard too many stories of places under contract that ultimately don't close. Maybe because it seems too good to be true. Maybe because we adore our place and are heartbroken to let it go. Maybe because we're so busy and it's just another item to check off the list. Actually it's probably a combo of all of those.