It's been a whirlwind of a week. We spent every spare moment, including several non-spare moments (Jack watched lots of tv) getting our house ready to be photographed and put on the market. The night before our realtor came over with the photographer, I spent most of the night getting our home decluttered, minimized, and staged. I read Elsie Larson's blog post (from A Beautiful Mess blog) about how she went the extra mile and took tons of "unnecessary" steps to get their last home minimized and perfectly styled for sale and then it sold for $130,000 above asking price. I knew our home wouldn't do that well, but it inspired me to really go the extra mile in prepping our place for showings, etc.
It was a ton of work packing up absolutely everything that won't be necessary for us to live with during the next 2 months, but actually kind of thrilling and totally worth it. And it'll save us some time packing in the weeks before we have to move. Our home photographed so well that it ended up selling before it officially hit the market, and before we'd had even a single showing. It was bizarre! Our realtor had a little meeting with some other realtors in town, and pitched our home to them with some pictures so they could start hyping it up to prospective home buyers. We got lucky selling in a big-time seller's market. There are tons of buyers right now, and only like 50 homes on the market in all of Casper.
Anyway, a couple finishing up an Emergency Medicine fellowship in Iowa made an above-asking offer two nights before our home was supposed to hit the market. They even offered to pay closing costs. The only hitch was that they were asking to move in on May 25, and Jared's residency isn't over until the end of June. We countered with what they had already offered, plus a requirement that we stay through the end of June and they show us their preapproved financing. Their realtor came over the next day to do a facetime tour of our home with them, and five minutes after that was over they signed the contract. I was initially skeptical to take the very first offer, but our realtor told us that 90% of the time the first offer is the best one, so we took his word for it and we're happy we did. I don't have pictures of our place with me, but here is a link to the Zillow listing. It's expired now that we have an offer and a backup offer, but the pictures should still be there. It was a bit of a yucky day so the exterior shots aren't too exciting, but the interior ones turned out nice:
https://www.zillow.com/b/Bar-Nunn-WY/42.929015,-106.347055_ll/