Tuesday, March 31, 2015

Spring Break and a Broker

Spring has sprung, and spring break is upon us.  The kids are jumping for joy at not having alarm clocks or homework for a week.  Meanwhile, I still have kids that I babysit being dropped off at the crack of dawn, meals to prepare and a house to keep in order.  Some break!

The biggest chaos in our lives at the moment is that we have our home on the market.  Actually, we sold it a week ago, but we're "contingent."  I didn't understand how big the word "contingent" would be in my life until recently.  For those of you living contentedly in your homes and not obsessing every second about realty, this basically means that we will really and truly only sell if we're able to buy another house.  In our case, within 10 days.  And wouldn't you know it -- in the last ten days every house we were interested in was snatched up by another buyer.  So here we sit, praying that an amazing house pops up on the market and we edge everyone else out before the deadline.

Naturally, there are a bunch of houses out there for sale that are similar in price to the one we're selling.  But we happen to be looking at the next level up for our next home, where the pickings are slim.  Apparently we're not the only ones out there trying to upgrade from a three bedroom to a four, or from a one story to a two.  And to make things worse, if we don't find another house and we pass our deadline and fall out of contract, we're right back where we started.  Not the end of the world, but I admit I was a bit pleased at the prospect of not having to live in a "show ready" house every minute of the day.  Because these guys and their hair make that difficult.


There are highlights to having gotten the house show ready, though.  Like finding out there's such a thing as chemical cleaning for your carpets, which makes them so clean that you no longer see the "clean" spots under area rugs.  And the fresh paint on top of the fresh drywall means I don't have to hide holes that made their way into our lives over time.

A downside?  The garage has become the drop off point for anything we don't want showing, making it the most embarrassing place in the world for people to see.  I actually feel like apologizing to anyone who sees it, and then explaining that it's not my fault -- we were forced into it.  But of course anyone who has ever sold a house knows, the garage is your relocation space.  "If you don't use it every day, it goes in the garage."  That was good advice from my kick ass realtor, who by the way spent an entire day tackling our yards to make them better.  He even took out a bush that I'd always hated AND brought new rock over to cover up the older stuff.  We've since gone a step further and did this where the bush used to be.


Definitely an improvement.

And that's my life.  The usual routine with the fun addition of obsessing about house sales.  I guess it wouldn't be me if I wasn't obsessing about something!

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