Archive for the ‘Open House’ Category

Kids… Let’s Go See Some Open Houses


2010
03.01

Day 63 - 28 to go. We are having the mold retested on tuesday and have postponed the remediation til the 8th. The inspector (using term loosely here) didn’t do a baseline comparison of the exterior and we have found out that this is definitely something you do when testing for mold. Geez! How hard is it to do a job right the first time these days?

 

Well, we still haven’t heard regarding our counter offer on the foreclosure house that we submitted nine days ago. In the spirit of keeping our housing options open, we went ‘Open Housing’… with the kids.

 

The first house we didn’t even go in. My husband and I just didn’t vibe with the neighborhood. Way to suburban for us. I felt like I was on the set of Edward Scissorhands, so we drove onto the next locale. My kids didn’t even notice, they were both thumbing away on their machines.

 

The second house was cute, in a nice ‘normal’ neighborhood but it was a bit small. The kids started arguing over which bedroom was going to be theirs even after we told them we weren’t even going to buy this house. My daughter gave up and decided she would room in the basement using the pool table for her bed. She was quite excited about this.

 

The third house was in the Homeland section of Baltimore City. Big house on a busy road. 4 bedrooms, large basement detached garage, and a kitchen that needed updating. My son looked at me with a big smile on his face and nodded… “I like this one.” Again the two of them started fighting over claiming rights to bedrooms. My daughter even stood in the one that was “hers” with her arms crossed and a mean pouty look on her face that said… “I’m not moving from this spot… Go get my things, I’m moving in!” It was nice, but didn’t feel right.

 

The fourth house was in the Mt. Washington neighborhood. A contemporary that was very nicely and recently redone. We really liked it. Nice sized kitchen, large floor to ceiling windows, beautiful bathrooms, and… one of my favorite things, a sun porch. The only problem was where would we put all our junk? There was no garage and no basement. We did walk around it a few times soaking it all in, trying to picture living there, but we couldn’t get past the storage issue. Yeah, where would I put my collection of “I can’t remember what’s in that box, but I know I need it” things. As we were leaving I realized I only had one child. Where was my daughter? I couldn’t find her. She had closed herself in a closet, again pouting over the bedroom choices. This time she wanted the master because it had it’s own bathroom.

 

Today Roxie, our real estate agent, is taking us around to a few more places… this time without the kids.

 

BTW – A birthday “shout out” to my Mom and my niece. Have a Happy Birthday!

The Nightmare of the Last House We Sold


2010
01.14

Day 18 – New open house set for Valentines Day. Hopefully not as big of an event in Baltimore as a Raven’s Game. Agent preview went well, the potential “out of towners” will be by on Saturday for a looksy. Cross your fingers!

 

The last time we had a house on the market it was a NIGHTMARE! The following is what happened in a nut shell:

 

Our cute little house sat on the market for quite some time. Stupidly, we bought our current house before selling the last one (oops, won’t do that again). We dropped the sale price of our cute little house many times with no avail — we got desperate. So, we rented it… to a cat lady… WHO TRASHED IT!… It was so awful! I have never seen or smelled anything so fowl. We had to pull it off of the market.

 

After many headaches, much cleaning and disinfecting… did I mention cats? We finally got an offer. Way lower than I was initially hoping for, but with three mortgages and the house in it’s new state… did I mention cats? We needed to take what we could get. So we signed on the dotted line.

 

Oh, but wait, it’s not over… There was the now infamous Home Inspection. Yes, my friends, major plumbing fiasco! Who says the inspector has to run all the water in the house and flush the toilet in the basement all at the same time? Our basement flooded. We’re talking a foot of water down there! My cute little house was swimming in sewage. Arrgghh! So it looked like we might never sell the house and toss the cat lady to the curb. But thank God, our buyers were determined. So, one plumbing crew, one bobcat, one trashed and dug up front lawn, one brand new sewer pipe to the street and $5,000 later, we were ready to close.

 

Closing day was finally here! We did our final walk through of the house amongst cleaning crews and Animal Control… oh, did I mention cats? Finally many, many, many months later, the selling of our Cute Little House was OVER! …I was drunk by noon.

 

Was it the ending of the nightmare? We had hoped so. Let’s just say… “Your Honor, that cat lady must have nine lives.”

 

meow

Selling the Homestead


2010
01.12

So… We have decided to sell our house. Yes, in this market! Selling our home was a decision that my husband and I did not come to lightly. It has been quite an interesting journey so far. My mother-in-law suggested that I blog about our experience. I basically laughed at her. Me? Blog? That would mean I would need to… WRITE! I haven’t written anything except emails since a few art history papers in college. Writing is not something that I do. I’m an artist not a writer. But, Hey, I decided to give it a go. This might actually end up being very entertaining.

 

Ok, here it goes… We are on Day 16 of being on the market. Let me just start by saying we are located in the vicinity of Baltimore, Maryland and our first Open House was this past Sunday. During the Ravens Game! Wild Card Playoff Ravens Game. Where our Ravens (and yes, I’m a fan!) Trounced [bash, beat, bury, bust, clobber, conquer, cook one's goose, crush, fix one's wagon, flog, make mincemeat of, murder, overcome, overwhelm, paste, pommel, put away, thrashed, walk over, walloped, wipe off the mat]  the New England Patriots! …Our Open House was from 1-3… NO ONE came!

 

I have a feeling selling our home will be just like that Raven’s Game. Although, unfortunately… I’ll be Tom Brady.