Hot Weather, Cool Market

Time for confession: it has been more than a week since our last house showing. Two of the three houses our realtor framed as "competitors" are pending. Since bad things often happen in threes, I guess it's only fair to mention that our realtor left our front door unlocked after the open house last week and then accused us of attacking him when my husband voiced rather pointed displeasure.

If that counts for our three bad things, it must mean that three good things are on the way. With those other pesky houses out of the way, our house looks even more attractive. That's number one. (OK, I'm spinning, but allow me some latitude here!) Number two: Day after tomorrow is the Fourth of July, which means hundreds of potential buyers will be descending on the 'hood for the world's most eclectic Fourth of July Parade and carnival. There will be lots of tatoos, men in skirts, transgender hairdressers and me, a Lawnchair Lady, decked out in full Superwoman attire. Every member of the family has an important part to play in this creative display of patriotism.

Our realtor promises to have posters in full view along the parade route. Let's hope that makes a difference and he can redeem himself from the whole unnecessary chimney work debacle that served as a real trust-breaker for us.

Stay tuned for stars-and-stripes details. And good news, part three. There just has to be three, yes?

Holidaze

The sun has set on June. Bring on July and new hope. Independence from a second mortgage. It has to be a day closer every day. Independence from the worries of creative home marketing techniques.

Here's a thought: the neighborhood fills with folks from all over for its eclectic Fourth of July Parade, which happens, ideally enough, on the Fourth of July. Heck, it even has its own website!
Why not tap into those distinctive resources to spread the word about the best house for sale in the 'hood?

Let's see if flyers on telephone poles lining the parade route help. . . they can't hurt!

A Matter of Trust

As the sun rises on yet another week on the market, I sense cloudy skies ahead. Literally. The storms have been sudden and furious, mimicking the frustration that I started feeling when our realtor recommended a specific chimney mason to check out what he said was the horrible condition of our outer wall.

At first, I thought it was just convenient that this chimney mason just happened to be working on our realtor's home as well. I started to feel a bit queasy when our communications with said chimney mason came directed through our realtor's email account. Then my husband had a phone conversation with the chimney guy and was won over. But I felt even more sick when I added up the cost estimates, which again came through the realtor's email--more than $12K didn't even completely cover the cost. And this "expert" refused to guarantee the work less than his total. He swore our two chimneys needed to be completely torn down and rebuilt and that the entire side wall needed to be rebuilt.

I stalled. I denied. I did everything possible to try to avoid the fact that our only financial option seemed to be raiding our 401K plans. A few days passed and a few more opinions trickled in. Not only did they cast a shadow over the original chimney guy's honesty, it was like they cast a rain cloud. Not only were the chimneys perfectly straight, the wall was in decent shape, too. Tuckpointing, yes. Major surgery, no.

Sometimes stalling is good. Like yesterday. I was out with my friend who was running errands before leaving the country for six weeks. We stalled outside the dry cleaners as a torrential downpour, hail and all, slowed our day's progress. Sometimes moving fast is good, too. Like when we beat the aforementioned storm by dashing to the car just seconds before the downpour.

Beating the downpour may have been dumb luck. Getting a second and third opinion, on the other hand, is anything but luck. It may have stemmed from desperation, from wanting to hear better news, and from some inner instinct that chimney guy number one was a little too anxious to tear down our walls.

So we're weathering the storms of real estate, holding tight to what little money we have left, and, for the moment, keeping that 401K in check. Whatever the future holds, we'll be sure to keep our eyes to the skies and look for a break in the weather.

Day by Day

Today marks the start of week number three. Time flies when your house is on the market!

Good news--lots of people want to see our house. Bad news--no one loves it yet. In fact, after a flurry of activity and a decent open house, barely a nibble of sustained interest. Doesn't anyone know old house charm anymore?

Maybe another sunny day of cool breezes and optimism will bring new reason to hope before slashing the price. . . maybe.

Atrocious manners

There are lots of adjectives people could use to describe any given situation. A shared romance could be haunted or idyllic. A new pet could be adorable or dangerous. And a new house on the market could be spectacular or "atrocious," depending on your taste and your manners.

It was the first Open House day today, so from 2-4 pm all I wanted to do was spy. I wanted someone, anyone to feed me reactions instantly. I wanted to know the who, what, when, where and way.

And it didn't matter that several couples saw and liked the house. There was the "atrocious" woman who stormed around our stairs. Her dismissive words linger in our heads like a not-so-gentle breeze. Her dismissive words may as well have been every other person who saw the home--but they weren't.

Her dismissive words made me indignant. They made me self-righteous and worse, just plain angry.

Not the way you want to walk away from an open house, but at least we were nowhere in sight!

No News is No News

After Thursday, I was hopeful. Two showing should have elicited some sort of clue to the house-selling mystery. With knowledge, comes power. (Insert other appropriate cliches here.)

Then Friday passed and no word from the realtor, who I learned last night was out of town on a camping trip with his daughters. He had no email access, so had no new info about feedback or interest.

So, instead of dwelling on non-news, let me tell you about lawn-whacking. It's a neighborhood tradition I just learned about this week--all part of a big run-up to the Fourth of July madness in Northside. Wednesday morning as I rush out the door, I'm greeted by a broken down plastic rocking horse (charming, but the stuffing leaking from his head was a definite turn off), two American flags surrounded by stems of plastic flowers and red-white-and-blue pinwheels. Oh, and a plastic hedgehog. My front yard looked decidedly patriotic, in a plastic-rocking-horse-with-leaking-head sort of way.

There was a sign, thankfully, noting that we had been lawn-whacked. Add a piece of kitsch to the collection and pass it off to another neighbor sucker within 48 hours, or, I suppose, that rocking horse head might end up inside my bed! Whoever ends up with this collection of patriotism on July 3 has to take it to the neighborhood Fourth festival, the likes of which you have to see to believe.

With the handy instruction sheet in hand, I allowed myself to enjoy the front-yard display for a day as I plotted about what to add to the pile. In the end, two small firetrucks made the cut, turning the lawn monstrosity into a mini-equivalent of a Fourth of July parade with two main floats--a nearly headless horse and a hedgehog. I traveled to the old house neighborhood to lawn-whack an old friend in the wee hours of the morning yesterday, leaving a note at their door explaining the rules and their new obligations to the future of our republic.

See why I love my neighborhood?

The Waiting Game

I realize that compared to many real estate hard-luck stories, we have a long way to go. It hasn't been much more than a week that our house has been on the market. But since double-mortgage payments began last November, it seems like soooo much longer.

Today two more potential buyers did walk-throughs. We've heard nothing. It's like the worst blind date ever. Like we're completely blind. No clue whether they even asked for our number!

Two highlights for the day:

1. Another house in the neighborhood hit the market. Similar price point, much MUCH less desirable street and literally no curb appeal. That has to make us look good, right?

2. A night at the Northside Tavern reconnecting with old friends and making new ones. A night spent remembering the value of neighbors and friends who share good times and bad times. A night sharing a toast of good luck with women who face daunting challenges in the week ahead. A week being grateful for the fact that next Thursday night will come and we will gather again, put aside stresses of real estate and doctors' orders and everything that keeps us from being our best selves.

Until tomorrow--and maybe, just maybe, good news.

The View

Maybe by now you're wondering why I love my old house so much. Maybe it's the fact that it was a good first house. A solid first house. The place where both my sons learned to crawl and walk and talk and how to draw on walls.

Maybe it's because it's beautiful.

See that front porch? My favorite room in the house. Perfect for the Sunday New York Times and a strong cup of coffee. Perfect for cool evening breezes and glasses of wine. In other words, a great place for beverages any time of day or night.

Or the spacious living room. . .


See that hardwood lovingly refinished by hand? Ahh. The memories.

The kitchen first sold me on the place. And I like to cook.


There are lots of things to love about this house. Sure, it's not perfect. No old house is. That's part of the fun of owning the crotchety old things, though. You find out their quirks, you learn to live with them, you love them, you hate them, they comfort you, they annoy you. It's the non-personification of marriage. It's that constant pull, that ever-present push, that hunger that can only be sated by a good night's sleep in your own bed.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. Or way off topic.

Tomorrow holds another showing. Keep your fingers crossed!

No fairy tales

So by now you can guess we thought we would be sitting pretty come listing day. The house we loved was clean (relatively), housed a super-modern-and-cool bathroom (which set us back more than I'd care to admit) and all the perks that had held us in place for 14 years.

And by now you can guess we were wrong.

That first day, offers didn't come flying in through the door. On the bright side, we had two showings within two days. That sounded exciting! People were going to see the house through our rose-colored glasses, see the potential, the great character, the charm. Surely they would see the result of three months of grueling work re-painting, cleaning, installing new fixtures, fixing small fixes, all that stuff that you never have time for but make time for after you move. Surely they would swoon at the Florida room, now bathed in a coat of caramel paint that looked so inviting you migh just want to lick it. Not so fast.

In fact, they saw the broken window in the back, the result of an errant baseball. Wouldn't you know that we'd never had a broken window in 14 years, but the month before the house goes up for sale, my sons decide to hit a long ball into the Florida room? And wouldn't you know that the special glass not only cost upwards of $500, but takes 10 days to construct in some glass factory far far away. So while we have paid for the new glass and await only its arrival on the scene, it still proved off-putting.

First feedback was baffling. Great neighborhood, but where was the central air? Where was the first-floor bath? Mind you, both of those items were nowhere on the listing, and in fact, a cursory glance at the specs would have shown otherwise. Still, those were the questions from the first walk-throughs.

Those and the biggest surprise of all--the side brick wall and chimneys. Tuckpointing and grouting and scaffolds, oh my! Turns out that what we never knew can hurt us, not to mention pull the rug out from under the value and attractiveness of our home.

And that was just the beginning!

The Realtor

At first, I figured we wouldn't need a realtor to sell this gem of a house. It was a great house on a great street with wonderful neighbors, a nature preserve and cool trails at the end of the block. It practically sold itself.

In my dreams. I put a listing in the neighborhood email newsletter at first, just a little test to see how hard it would be to monitor the flood of responses. None came. Uh-oh.

Almost overnight, I realized the amount of work involved in selling a house. The marketing, the legal details, the potential for scammers, the potential for lots of mistakes. What was I thinking? I could sell a house, do my full-time job, spend time with my kids, my husband, my friends. . . .

OK, I was a fool.

It was much easier to pretend the old house didn't exist once we started living in the new one last November. The only pesky reminders were those mortgage and utility bills that intruded on new-house bliss every month.

Once I realized I was not the realtor of my dreams, we set out to find a real one. A pro who knew all the right buyers, knew just what to say and most of all, who really loved our house.

The first realtor we checked out came with great street cred. Buyers loved him! Colleagues praised him! Neighbors raved about him!

Only problem was, he turned up his nose at our house. Not intentionally. And he covered it well, but there was a decided lack of enthusiasm about the very characteristics we loved. The carved wooden fireplace. The brick-enclosed front porch. The wide-open first-floor plan. The super cool new modern bathroom. Nothing impressed the guy.

So we wasted another month, or two, trying to make changes he suggested but we didn't believe in. It didn't work.

Finally, the calvary arrived. My in-laws spent two weekends plus doing a clean sweep of the place--they painted, they replaced ceilings and faucet fixtures, they cleaned like demons. Without them, we would already be in debtor's prison. Sometimes it is good to be from a family of seven. This was one of those times.

Then the unthinkable happened. The house next door to our new house went up for sale. In four days, there were seven offers on the place. Incredible! The time seemed ripe, and when the realtor for that house offered a friendly wave, it seemed like serendipity. This, we thought, could be our guy. Maybe he had the magic touch we needed. Just maybe. . .

The 411

We heard the nightmare stories as the real estate market started to slide. But then we found our dream house and fell hard. Those hard-luck stories of houses that never sold, that could never be us, right? Right?

OK, some back story. Jim and I bought our first home in the wonderfully wacky Cincinnati neighborhood of Northside 15 years ago. I loved the first house at first sight. Jim took two visits to warm up. In that Tudor on a private, wooded cul-de-sac, we started our family and literally set down roots. Especially in the front yard, where we nixed some awful shrubbery and invested in some pretty landscaping.

(Somewhere along the line, I started writing like a real estate ad.)

But with two kids--boys who were growing fast and an almost 13-year-old in need of some private space--we realized we had outgrown our cozy beginnings. So, in no particular rush, we pondered moving closer to the neighborhood's burgeoning business district. What could be better than to walk to the neighborhood coffee shop, the library, the indy video store, the indy record store, the indy shoe store, the indy vegan-friendly restaurant--catching the drift?

We put a bid on a great new house (actually, an 1899 house) just as the real estate bubble burst with a vengeance. That was October. Months and months of procrastinating and half-hearted home emptying later, our old house finally went on the market one week ago today.

Take a look:


Isn't it pretty? Don't you just love it? OK, back to the story.

How better to deal with the stress of this life-changing transition than to blog about it, right? I teach journalism, and I tell all of my students that blogging is a sign of real passion, real dedication. Write about something that you obsess about, I advise. So here goes.