3 posts tagged “house selling”

Yesterday, while the inspector was at our house with the buyer, I went out with our real estate agent to look at houses.  Wowie.  A couple of cute little prospects, and some seriously scary ones, too.

We're looking to really take a step down on our mortgage and get some of our equity out of our current house, so most of the houses I looked at yesterday are currently rental properties. Most of the renters are college students, although one house was occupied by a family of hippies.
 

I've lived in rental properties before.  I was prepared for things to be rough around the edges and that was certainly the case. What I wasn't truly prepared for was the piggery.  Of the five houses I saw, four were occupied by people who weren't using a dresser or a closet to store their clothes, but were simply stockpiling them in one giant mound of wrinkled, festering fabric, wedged between bed and wall.  Was there, I wondered, a system?  Clean clothes go in one side, dirty clothes in the other?  Was there a continuum?  Like a Kinsey scale of cleanliness.

(The fifth house?  It was EMPTY.)

And the hippie house?  Oh lord.  In addition to Peasant Skirt Mountain and the Birkenstock Valley, there was The Bedroom That Could Not Be Entered.  Full to the ceiling with crap.  Look, you wanna call your second bedroom a "recording studio" and sit around smoking pot in it and burning incense until the pores of the walls are infused with Patchouli, fine.  Whatev.  But when your three kids have to sleep in the same bedroom with you and your partner, because the third bedroom is full of dirty clothes, broken toys, old magazines, and boxes of unknown crap, you have a problem.

Similarly, slacker college boys, when you've let the kitchen get so dirty that the only way to properly clean it is with two gallons of gasoline and a Zippo, it's time to get a fucking grip on yourselves.

So, can you guess which house I'm considering? 

Here we are.  The last day I can do anything meaningful before the end of the fiscal year.

What I've got is a phone ringing off the hook, a missing receptionist, a twitchy boss, two people who don't understand why they're not yet getting paid for the classes they just started teaching last week, plus four blisters, an aching hip, and a sore back.

Because I spent the whole weekend, from Friday night to Sunday night, crazily cleaning, sorting, painting, scrubbing, packing, organizing, and staging my house.  The realtor is supposed to come today to take pictures for our listing, and then we have an open house on Tuesday.

Stick a fucking fork in me, huh?

In preparation for moving , we have put our house on the market. Granted, house values have doubled since we first bought our humble little bungalow, but just recently the market has cooled. Suddenly, we're dyin' to get people to look at our house. Literally, it's not that we can't get an offer, but that we can't get anybody to come look at the house. So, we spend a lot of time playing with ideas about what we should do. We currently have an enclosed front porch, which is quite nice: It's sunny, great for storing crap, and provides a protective barrier between the cats and the outside world of fast-moving cars driven by morons talking to other morons on cell phones.

The downside is that it makes the outside of the house look...well, I don't want to say anything against my home. I love my little home, but it looks a bit dumpy. You can hardly tell it's a bungalow, and so we've spent some time speculating on whether opening the front porch wouldn't increase the much vaunted curb appeal. These little Craftsman bungalows do look nice with open porches, like this one in our neighborhood.

I admit: I lie awake nights worrying about this. How stupid is that? The other night, hubby and I wandered around the neighborhood looking at other bungalows. As we lost the daylight, we came across a little brick ranch with a for sale sign out front. I've walked by this house at least a thousand times, but that night I was absolutely compelled to stop. Next to the for sale sign was this sign:

I didn't know whether to laugh or cry. I nearly did both. I settled for taking a picture, although I'll probably never forget the sign and its desperate plea for admiration. It not only describes the real estate situation I find myself in, but a general feeling that most women carry around their whole lives. Not only do I need a sign like this in front of my house. I need one to wear around my neck.