Leaving Florida and house update

The last 5 months in Florida were crazy!  Before Nathan got home from deployment I finished up some painting in the front entry hallway.  I also cleaned, brightened, and stained the whole deck in the backyard.  

All this needed to get done before we could put the house on the market so I couldn't wait for Nathan to get home to help me.  We wanted to get the house on the market as soon as possible.  Unfortunately we didn't get the house on the market until April 15th which meant we missed the peak by about 2 weeks...

Here are the professional pictures.  I thought they turned out really nice.

Eventually we took the house off the market for about 10 days when our house was getting packed up by the movers.  This was around June 18th.  During this time Nathan and I decided to paint over the blue and pink paint in the boy's and girl's room to white.  We also repainted the playroom upstairs.  We weren't sure if we were going to be able to sell our house (it had been on the market 2 months by now and we had probably 30 showings with no offers) so we also had it up for rent.  We thought it might rent better if the rooms were more neutral.

We left Florida I think on July 12th with our house still on the market and still up for rent.  While we were visiting family in Idaho on our way to California we decided to find a new realtor since our contract with our original realtor was finally up.  We cut our price a lot and had to wait almost 2 weeks before our house was put back on the market, but within 3 weeks we had an offer!  Which was good because the day before we had some people interested in renting.  I didn't feel super great about the renters (3-4 contractors coming and going) but we were getting kind of desperate.

Things were still stressful up until we finally sold it.  The person we hired to take care of our lawn never showed up so our neighbors were getting upset because they were trying to beat back the jungle that was taking over our backyard.  We thought everything was getting taken care of until they finally complained to our realtor.  Oops!  Our AC unit got clogged which started to make our house smell with all the standing water.  Luckily the rental agent came by and found the problem before it overflowed onto our flooring.  That was a nightmare to try and find someone to come take care of that mess.  I can't remember all the details but we were supposed to close on Oct. 1st but something happened on the buyers end that we had to push back the closing date to I think the end of Oct. Luckily things finally came together and we ended up closing on the 15th!  I'm so glad that we finally were able to sell our house and be done with all that craziness!