hooray!

We made it, settlement is over! We closed on the house last night and although it was a tremendous relief, it was bittersweet.
We love that house and really wanted to have a positive experience with our buyer, but our buyer turned out to be someone with .....um....some neurotic issues. We started out the process being very flexible, offering up her some free furniture and my husband's sports fathead in the rec room. We gave her access to our house 4 separate times to show her family and friends, simply because we wanted to be generous. We would have wanted someone to treat us that way and we were pleased that our buyer seemed so very excited about the house- after all, we were when we first bought it nearly 5 years ago.
But after the home inspection things went downhill. She became pretty unreasonable (wanting to ask us to fix absurd cosmetic details that were barely noticeable even when her inspection was supposed to be for "informational purposes only" as she had agreed to). She had a horrible home inspector that was about as flaky as a pie crust to top things off and complicate things further. At that point I felt like a pirate was attempting a hostile takeover of my beloved home and it started to become an excruciating process trying to get things ready before closing.
All in all it was a miserable experience that I didn't handle well. I would love to say that after all this I learned to shine in a time of crisis, but I didn't. I completely lost my mind from about October until, well, this morning. As of today we officially start a new chapter in our life and I am excited about moving on.
Now, off to nag my husband to put up my curtain tie backs and pictures so that I can get some photos!