Keeping our Fingers Crossed

As many of you know, we have had our house on the market for about 4 months now. I know a lot of people think we are crazy selling our house in this economy, but we figured if we take a loss on our house now, we can get into a house that we probably wouldn't be able to afford in a better economy.
We decided last November that we wanted to move into a bigger place. I wanted to move to the North End, Mike wanted nothing to do with it because he wanted a "new house." We decluttered and staged our place all of December and went through several houses with our great realtor. He took us through the old houses I liked in the North End and through the new houses that Mike liked. After a long day of looking, we went to one last house in University Place and Mike and I fell in love with it. My dreams of an old house disappeared once I saw the huge closets, new bathrooms, Master Suite, and modern kitchen.
The next day someone made an offer on the house that we loved, but we held out hope because they still had 3 more houses to build in that neighborhood. We immediately put our house on the market (by this time it was the middle of January). Our realtor told us that the average house would sell in 90 days, but that was in a good market.
After 3 long months on the market, 3 open houses, 2 price reductions and several showings we still didn't have an offer. I was getting tired of making our house look perfect and Mike was getting tired of being kicked out of our house for showings.
My mom, not being one to ever hold back, told us that our "sale was stale." She came up with a plan to order a statue of St. Joseph to bury in our yard just like this one.
Apparently home owners in Italy have been burying statues of St. Joseph in their yards for years and swear that houses sell faster when you do this. As soon as my mom ordered this statue, we had a woman request a second showing (always a good sign). As soon as the statue arrived on her doorstep, the woman's realtor called ours and said she was thinking about making an offer. As soon as I put the statue in our house (the pamphlet said this would work too), we received an offer. Here is the little guy working hard in our dining room.

As soon as we accepted the offer, our realtor couldn't get this sign up fast enough. The stapling was music to our ears.

Oh and that house I was talking about in University Place....we sort of switched gears and made an offer on this one in Gig Harbor. We were drawn to the small town feel and the woods that surround the development.

The builder accepted our offer and it is now contingent on the closing of our house, which takes me to the "Keeping our Fingers Crossed" title on this posting. We still need to get through the home inspection on our house, which is scheduled for Monday. Our realtor told us that buyers can walk away at anytime, so we don't want to get our hopes up. I'm not even going to start packing until after the inspection, which by the way gives us less than 2 weeks (and zero weekends, because we will be out of town) to be completely packed and out of here. So please keep your fingers crossed that our inspection goes well and our buyer doesn't get cold feet! I will keep you posted on how our inspection goes.