so close, yet so far

The appraisal is complete and our buyers haven't complained so it must have covered the sale price. Our buyers decided to do the inspection themselves, which we found odd. It's a fairly new home, and we are paying for a home warranty, so maybe they don't think much could be wrong. But, we're baffled that they wouldn't spend a couple hundred to get a professional to look over the house to verify there aren't any non-obvious problems.

The sellers on our new home were happy to extend the closing date on our contract for another couple weeks, so everything is looking good for the closing and move in the next 2 weeks.

Our buyers came by on Sunday to do the inspection, said they needed 3 hours. We decided to head up to the new house, visit our friends across the street, and rake leaves. I'd assumed it would be about an hour's job.

15 orange bags, 6 blisters, and 4 hours later, we were done.

Did I mention we've got 7 big trees on the new lot? 2 ash trees, 3 maples, and another 2... something else ... and a couple assorted smaller trees -- peach, crab apple, birch. The ashes and had dropped all their leaves, the maples and other big trees still had the majority of their leaves. Guess what I get to look forward to doing again in a few days?

We roll back home around 8pm, and realize our buyers had left the back door out of the garage wide open. Awesome!

Soon all the contract drama will be over, and all that will be left is moving 9 years of accumulated crap. And then we can kick back on the huge back deck at the new house.