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Thursday, Apr. 28, 2005
Sheesh, whatta week. I don�t think I�ve worked this hard in years.

Or at least, not since the last time I put a house up for sale.

We cleaned. And trashed. And cleaned some more. Beth the Eldest took a day off from work, showing up at my doorstep at 6 am with a steely glint in her eye. �Get up out of that recliner!�, she roared, and the feeble father limped forth to chuck boxes and odd furniture from the maw of the garage for 14 hours straight.

I swear, the stuff that accumulates. Beth made four trips to the dump and we barely put a dent in it. We wanted to �Reduce Clutter� as all the realtors suggest, and that meant putting stuff somewhere for later retrieval. That required a rented storage shed, in a 5 acre compound of sheds, and at a price just south of what I paid to rent my first apartment. It�s about half full now, and I do believe I could fill it completely and still lead a better than Spartan existence.

I told my Watering Hole real estate broker not to put a lock box on the house. That I didn�t want a sign in the yard. We both figured it would be sold over the previous weekend, since he publicly listed it last Saturday and we both kinda sat back and rubbed palms together, waiting for the floodgates of bids.

Many lookers came by. The dining room table is festooned with realtors cards. But not an offer, not a bid. I suspect the price is too high. I mean, I wouldn�t pay this much to live here, even though it is a nice neighborhood. But others have. So I can only conclude that our curb appeal and the general lopsidedness of the recliner and the copious scattered dog hair is throwing them off.

I suggested an open house to the WH broker, with free beer.

He doesn�t think that�s such a good idea just yet. It�s a little early for that. Besides which, the only people it would likely attract is the entire population of the Watering Hole in general. And I just can�t see Chief Mo or Stu or anyone else from up there buying this place. It has no neon and darn few barstools, for one thing.

Everyone asks the same thing. �So where are you going to move to, when you sell?� I guess they�re expecting some sort of radical move-up into one of the new brick mansions that are completed at a rate of three per day around here. (No exaggeration, by the way. Matter of fact I�m probably understating.)

Hell I don�t want that. I personally hate those attention grabbing hovels of yuppiedom. I generally tell them something vague, like �Oh, we�ll probably rent somewhere for a year. Just see what happens, you know.�

Truth be told, I�d like a years reprieve from a mortgage. I�d like a chance to set some dough aside, to improve our credit and be away from that whole home improvement mentality.

Then I�d like to move to some backwater and spend a couple of years building a four room shack with a barn while Ally and I lived in an RV onsite. That�s what I�d really like to do.

What I actually wind up doing, of course, is anyone�s guess. Although I suspect is will involve a fair amount of things to do with a recliner. A battered and listing recliner, at that.

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