Blessing and a Curse

Selling your home can be an enormous undertaking. Depending on the market you're in, it can take as little as a day or as long as 90 (or more!). It's interesting, I think, how many people don't fully prep their house for sale: clear away all the clutter and knick knacks, take the magnets off the fridge, put away the kids' classroom art, and keep the house spotless. It shouldn't be surprising though - keeping your house that way is a LOT of work.

I should know - today is the 14th day we've had our house on the market. And everytime the phone rings, I catch my breath. It's a blessing and a curse. Blessing because more than likely its an agent calling to bring a client by to see the house. This, of course, is a good thing. You can't sell your house without people seeing it. It's also not so good a thing, though, because it means you need to pick up and vacate the house PDQ. Which, in the middle of the day when you're trying to "work from home", becomes somewhat of a nuisance.

So here we sit at the local coffee shop with free wifi, Rembrandts, waiting for the "all clear" sign to head back to the house. The toughest thing about that is that real estate agents are like the cable guy - they give you a 1-2 hour window during which they'll be by when in reality they're going to be in the house for a whopping 15 minutes at best, and then they're ALWAYS late.

The past 2 days, the phone has been eerily silent. No phone calls, no visits, no nothing. Hmmm. Today we're home working away (or in my case, not so much working), planning to do our packing for Portland this afternoon, when the phone rings. Agent. Coming by in 10 minutes. Yikes! Good thing the house cleaner was just here this morning. As we're doing the final sweep of the house (dishes in the dishwasher, pack up the laptops to head to the coffee shop, grab the dogs) *RING*! Another one - this time coming between 1:30 & 2:30. Okay - this is good. We want to sell the house - in fact, we need to sell the house. We just need to boogie home at 3 and pack, so we can get the heck outta dodge.

Here's hoping we sell the house soon - both so we can have sold the house and so we can go back to living in our house before we have to give it all up!