Wednesday, November 12, 2008

House selling - and buying

How's this for domestic?

We're trying to sell our house. And, of course, buy a new one.

It's still amazing to me that I am old enough to a) own a house; and b) sell a house that I own. I'm a twentysomething - shouldn't I be in some tiny miserable apartment in a city?

Oh well. In any case, selling a house is a hell of a lot harder than it looks on HGTV. Sure, I've watched "Designed to Sell" and thought, duh. Those homeowners are just stupid. Clean up the crap, paint over the hot-pink walls, and fix the gaping hole in the floor/ceiling/wall. As it turns out, most fixes take more than 30 minutes.

So far in this venture, we've installed flooring and trim, painted, packed and cleaned cleaned cleaned. It may not sound like much, but the house looks WAY better than it did when I first walked into a realtor's office and said, "We're thinking about selling our house. How exactly would we do that?"

Which is pretty much what I did.

Fortunately, my ignorance and blind faith in the real estate gods led us to Edna, our super-agent. She took our case – I mean house – and told us how to make it a winner.

It worked.

Our first open house drew a surprising amount of interest (even in this market), and we are awaiting an offer. I'm psyched. With any luck, we will soon be moving to a cute college town much larger than the one in which we currently reside (read: more exciting). And the house we have our eye on is still for sale.

Holy moly. I'm on the verge of being a NOT first-time home buyer or seller.

Tuesday, November 11, 2008

Practically domestic

I like crafts, and cooking, and occasionally doing things like, oh, selling one house and buying another. I also like sports and reserve the right to go off-topic with sport-related posts at any time.