It's On By Michael

The ubiquitous real estate For Sale sign: it's everywhere and it's unremarkable...until it's the one planted in your front yard. Now that's remarkable. We've been preparing for five years to sell the house and we are totally mentally prepared for it. Yet I'm still a bit surprised when I see the gloss-white 4x4 post out there with the Open Sunday placard perched on top, such a strange thing. Even weirder still is opening the house to complete strangers to walk through and make judgements about whether our beloved home is a place they'd want to call their own.


Our house, for the time being

I think it will sell quickly. We've priced it competitively based on other new listings nearby. It went on the market yesterday and we've already had half a dozen folks come by with their agents. Tomorrow we have two more scheduled and the open house the day after. All very encouraging.

But this ain't 2006 and I imagine there is greater potential in 2011 for any real estate deal to fall through. Financing is more difficult to obtain, it's a buyers market, and who knows which recent foreclosure comps will cause it to not appraise near the contract price. Yikes.

So we are waiting and wrapping up a bunch of small details ahead of the open house. This past month has flown by. Every one of us has been sick at some point, me for most of the month. This has made it much harder to get everything done we needed to do to get to where we are today. We've painted the entire house, including ceilings. We've had the yard sale to end all yard sales. We've completed the final touches to a million little projects begun over the years. (Why didn't we paint and wrap up these projects before?)

If we do sign a contract in the next several days, and close about 40 days later, we could be on the road the second week of June.

Whoa.

Del Viento here we come!

--Michael