Well it's closing day and it's with mixed emotions that we say goodbye to our first home.

All the hard work and stress of moving aside, and as much as we  are looking forward to starting our next chapter with the new house, I couldn't help feeling a little sad as I took my last walk through the empty house - and with the hubby being away this week, I had to do this one solo.

Sometimes to get what you want, you have to be willing to walk away - which is exactly what we did when offer negotiations with the seller of the house we wanted reached a stalemate. After flat out rejecting our initial offer (which was admittedly WELL below his rather inflated asking price), it was pretty clear that talks between his agent and ours were going nowhere fast.

Up and down in less than 48 hours....and here we were all geared up to endure at least a couple weeks of stress around keeping the house in immaculate 'show ready' condition. When we listed the house, we thought we were a little bit on the ambitious side in terms of our asking price.  After reviewing the past sales and comparable properties in our area, we had an idea of what we were hoping to sell for and naturally priced ourselves slightly above that to leave some room for negotiation. What we really didn't imagine was that the house would go OVER asking or that things would get wrapped up so quickly and easily.