Moving forward... time to light the fire under this thing!

Our house "shopping" has emotionally turned into house hunting.  I am not sure when that happened but I am now no longer browsing the real estate listings casually and saving pictures on my Pinterest boards for future inspiration.  It's more like I am falling in love with, picking out furniture for, and mentally moving into at least one house a week.  I have completely gutted some homes in my brain and rebuilt them with my family in mind.  I have moved in and spent our first Halloween, Thanksgiving and Christmas there.  I know where I would put the Christmas tree.  It is obviously more than just "shopping" now.  Mike is also mentally moving forward by crunching the numbers repeatedly and swooning over our savings account growing bigger and our bills growing smaller. Our daydreaming is quite different in style but luckily share a common goal.

So we are putting our plan into action now.  We are not waiting to find the perfect house before we put our home on the market.  It is just the start of "Real Estate Season" in our neck of the woods.  That would be the time from about mid-April to mid-August.  The peak is around May/June and we want to have our house up for sale.  We don't want to miss that prime time to sell and we don't want to miss obtaining the house of our dreams because we haven't sold our current home.  Remember, we want to pay cash for our new house.  That cash needs to come from the sale of our current house.

The scary part of this plan is the possibility of us selling our house immediately and our adorable children and me and Mike become homeless until we find a house that suits our family's needs and budget.  To me that is more scary than us listing and not being able to sell our current house quickly so we can move.  I feverishly search the internet for new listings each and every day.  Even on Sundays when I know good and well that there will be no listing posted.  You never know.

Because I have been monitoring the market so closely now for a few weeks I can tell you without doubt that there is an upswing in listings lately.  I have noticed the weeks new listings going from 1 or 2, to 1 or 2 a day..... that is reassuring to me.  So far none of these homes have been in the area that we are searching for and within our parameters for the "perfect home".  But this is all okay with me since we still have a home to sell.