Market Value By Liz

Have you ever decided to take a leap of faith?  And when you did, have you ever fallen flat on your face?

When we spontaneously decided to sell our house this past Spring, we had champagne wishes and caviar dreams.  But six months later, we were still waiting for our happy ending…

It all seemed like such a great idea in the beginning.  Let’s sell the house that we’ve painstakingly remodeled for the past seven years. Yeah!  And then, let’s move into a RENTAL!  Because I’m sure we’ll be able to find a quaint little beach cottage to lease that will welcome with open arms our two hyper kids, two drooling dogs and stinky guinea pigs, right?

Um, maybe.  But we could worry about that later.  First, we needed to sell our house in this sh*tty market.  So after a weekend of stripping it of any defining picture(God forbid the prospective buyers see what we look like!) and shoving our closets full of anything that dared to reside on ANY surface, it was on like Donkey Kong.

I mean, who would be able to resist our hardwood floors and custom paint?  Our tiled yard with timed lights in the planter?  We had NO DOUBT that buyers would be in a bidding war faster than you could say Donald Trump.  Which is probably why we refused to listen when the local agent told us to list 30k lower than we did.  What did he know, right?

Um, apparently ALOT. Or at least a lot more than we did.

And by the time we finally swallowed our pride and lowered the price, it was too late.  We had already popped our proverbial cherry in the local market. Our listing had desperation written all over it and we were subjected to ridiculously lowball offers.  We were so OVUH!

And no amount of St. Joseph prayers, running horses pictures(don’t ask), or bowls of lemons could get our house-selling mojo going.  It. Was. Depressing.  Not to mention a huge pain in the ass to make the time each morning to both straighten my hair AND leave the house looking show-worthy with two kids under six. And did I mention that frizzy hair makes me cranky?

So after six months, we finally decided to throw in the towel. And I’m not gonna lie, the Type- A girl in me felt like a failure.  But as much as I had daydreamed of renting a little beach cottage and giving up the responsibility of home ownership, I also felt relieved to stay.  Or at the very least, to be able to have a damn picture of my kids on display and leave a dish in the sink occasionally!

But in the end, this control freak realized that some things in life are just out of your hands.  So, instead,  I’ve decided to focus on all the things I WON’T MISS about being on the market:

• Keeping my house looking like a f*cking museum.  You know it’s bad when you beg your five-year-old to watch another episode of Spongebob so she won’t pull out crayons and messy paints to make you a picture. *bad mommy*

• The feedback.  For some reason I took it personally when they hated on my galley kitchen or dogged my floorplan.  Why didn’t they just go ahead and tell me that my ass looked fat in those jeans too?

• The lovely agents who bring their clients back unannounced at 8pm to get “one last look” at the granite in our kitchen.  Because we always have everything under control at bath time, right? *cue VERY awkward twenty minutes involving naked children*

• The ego-bruising realization that no one thinks the ginormous surf mural in my daughter’s room is half as rad as I do. Um, hello!  Pink Surfboards!  What’s not to like?

• Open houses. For some reason, it bothers me that half the neighborhood has walked through my house. Like my house is some dirty slut with an STD that no one wanted. Like we’re the herpes house or something.

• The crazy paranoia.  I can’t tell you how many times I got to work and SWORE that I’d left my Hanky Pankys on my bedroom floor.  Hmmm…on second thought, maybe that would have made the house more appealing!

xoxo, Liz

Tagged as: Donald Trump, open house, real estate