by Nathan Stout (of AccordingToWhim.com)
No Chris, I am not selling my house, it’s just a blog title. This blog is about our economy and all the times we tried to sell this place.
Back in 2005 we lived in Fort Worth in a rent house off I-30. It was a noisy place what with the freeway yards from our front door but it did provide some entertaining moments when wrecks happened and stuff like that. The house didn’t sit on the freeway but up higher with I-30 in a canyon like setup. Anyways we lived there for a year or so but I got a job in Decatur so we began to look for somewhere to live up there. Decatur is about 45 minutes North of Fort Worth. My wife got a job there too so we all we needed to do was move. We looked and looked at houses in Decatur. This was my preference but the prices were too high (for some damn strange reason) and the wife didn’t like the houses that were in more reasonable neighborhoods. Decatur realty prices are still high and I could never figure that out. None of the houses are that great and the location isn’t fantastic either. It remains a mystery.
We took our search South and I made a huge mistake. I am not sure why in the WORLD I decided to look at mobile homes… well I can. They are cheaper and you get more room. I have had to do a lot of work on my mom’s mobile homes so I am not sure why I didn’t run screaming from these places. I am guessing it all came down to price. I could pay 120,000 for small 2 bedroom in Decatur or 60,000 for a 4 bedroom massive mobile home in Rhome. Needless to say we bought it. It needed a bit of work but I am cool with that. I am fairly handy and can do a lot with the right tools. If I knew then what I know now… I would have talked them down another 15 thousand!
We had been living in Rhome in a fairly nice (and as I said earlier, big) mobile home. Possibly THE nicest looking mobile home in the whole city (yeah, they look that trashy). I hate to hate on my neighbors but most of the people out here just don’t care. To be fair on Rhome, we ACTUALLY live in a city called New Fairview. Our address is Rhome but we reside in New Fairview… strange I know.
In 2009 we decided to move back into Fort Worth. The wife would be done with school and soon and I wanted to work back in the city so we were both keen to sell our house. We got the realtor who sold us the house to sell it for us this time. We set a price and waited. We went though a lot of trouble to make the house look super nice at all times so if we had a showing we didn’t have to panic. We showed the house several times but no one bought. We actually started the selling process with one person who just vanished (we even got to keep their earnest money). No other buyers… this was just as the economy was tanking but at the time we didn’t know this.
We have up in 2009 but went again the next year with the TOP selling realtor in Wise county. She was positive we would sell. I had done some more fixing around the house and it looked great once again. We did the usual super cleaning and de-cluttering and put it back on the market. We had about 12 showing in the 6 months it was up for sale. I even had a swanky website with a lot of pics of it. It looked like this (but this is the one from the previous realtor who tried to sell it for us). During all that time we had one positive buyer and even had the inspection done but they failed to get the final loan (they prequalified). After this we gave up again.
We are deep into the Bush/Obama economy and there is no light at the end of the tunnel. Over the last year we have put a lot into the house since it seems we are going to be here a bit longer and some stuff HAD to get done. We got skirting, leveling, irrigation fixed, I added some new plumbing, ran electricity down to the shed in the back, got new carpet, painted the outside (as you are all painfully aware), and so on. A bunch of things that I am sure will help sell it next time (if we ever get out of this market slump).
One day I would love to buy a real house with a real foundation in a neighborhood of my choosing. I am not sure when that will be but one can hope.
Wait! Don’t get me wrong I do like it here. I have made this place my own and done of alot of custom stuff to make it enjoyable and uptodate… it’s just I would like to have a real house some day.