Sold. Closed. Broke.

And when I say broke, I mean broke.  We closed on our house today.  It happened pretty fast.  We went under contract just 16 days ago.  The buyer paid cash, so that made the whole process faster.  On the one hand it's a major relief to just be done with it.  On the other hand, we were taken to the cleaners.  The highest offer we received and the one we accepted (after negotiating, of course), was less than what we owed the bank (it wasn't a short sale though).  Plus, we still had to pay closing costs and the 6% commission. 

Yesterday morning, I walked with the girls to the bank to take out every last penny of our savings and take out a large chunk from our line of credit to bring to closing today.  Now, I have to pay interest on a loan just to sell our house.  I feel like I never want to own a house again.  It was supposed to be such a great investment, but it ended up being a money pit.  We put at least $30k into renovating and updating parts of the house, and we still had to bring nearly that much to closing.  Just thinking about it makes me want to cry. 

We specifically set up closing so that we didn't have to meet the buyer.  I don't want to know anything about him.  I know his name, and that's enough for me.  He doesn't get possession of the house until next week.  We still have to move all of our furniture (for staging) out of the house.  Because the closing came so quickly and there were crucial deadlines for objection this week, we didn't want to move the furniture out in case it fell through and then the house wouldn't be staged for future showings.  We don't have room for most of the furniture at our new house.  We're going to be living in a cramped space for a few weeks.  I'll post most of it on craigslist, but I'd also like to have a yard sale.  We can't do that for at least three more weeks because of existing weekend plans.

I am sad that the house the girls came home from the hospital to is no longer ours.  It also had the most amazing yard and garage.  I miss that part of it.  However, we bought high and then had triplets.  Our financial situation changed so much that we just couldn't afford to stay there anymore. 

Now, we start fresh - we do our best to pay off the last of our debt and start saving again.

Our first house - notice the huge garage to the left behind the white fence: