Adventures in house selling

As I've mentioned, we are in the process of selling our home so that we may move from one side of NYC to the other (Long Island to NJ, unfortunately not actually in the city). Instead of spending this time writing a book review, like I should be doing, I decided I would tell you about what this has been like. This won't be book related at all, but could maybe help at least partly explain why I've been struggling to get an actual post out.

Me, trying to be coherent

When I first told my friends who had recently sold their own house that we were going to be going through this whole process, they laughed and said "It's all the stress of buying with none of the fun parts! Enjoy!"And then we drank.

Keeping the house clean has been the biggest pain so far. It's not that we're living in a house soon to be featured on hoarders or anything, but just keeping stuff "Open House" ready is a lot of work and involves me misplacing a lot of things as they end up shoved into whatever drawer happens to be closest. Of course, things are even more difficult when someone forgets to tell you people are going to be showing up until they're a couple hours away. I think that affected my subconscious more than I thought.

I had a dream the other day that someone was showing up to see the house ANY MINUTE and omg everything was a mess and there were a bunch of strange people over and they kept making things worse. Just before I woke up, I'm pretty sure I had decided to murder all these mess makers and I felt very relieved because now these people would stop making a mess and also, you don't have to worry about selling a house when you're in jail for murder!

Silver lining! Thanks subconscious, I take it you're worried about all this house stuff. Conscious hasn't been nearly has worried.

I've been watching...really the exact same amount of HGTV buying and selling homes shows I've always watched. But I'm paying slightly more attention right now. During a recent episode Tom and I were talking about what we'd do if we got a very low offer. At what point would we counter back with the list rate and at what point do we not counter back at all? We came up with a number and I sort of laughed cos man, that is low. Like, pretty much $100k under asking (and we're not exactly in a million dollar mansion over here). Someone won't actually go that low.

Someone went that low.

Actually, because it happened a day or two after that conversation, and they hit the EXACT number we said was too low to even consider, I assumed it was a joke. Tom texted me to say we got an offer, told me the amount, to which I replied "Counter back higher! 5 over asking! Obviously." Because I'm GREAT at negotiations. When he didn't respond right away, I wondered what's up. Finally he texted back saying "[Our agent] says she's sorry and embarrassed" to which I replied "OH wait, you were serious?"

So that's currently where we are. I'll probably follow this up with future posts, should something entertaining* happen. Now if you'll excuse me. I need to go clean the house. Again.

*Entertaining subject to interpretation.