Selling

I had no idea what selling a house entails. First, my realtor (who is wonderful) did a walkthrough and said, “oh, this is in great shape. We just need to do a few little things.”

Three weeks later, I feel like we have cleaned and spruced up every square inch of the house, and I’m exhausted, even though my mom did everything so I could spend all this time with Edith since I’m going back to work soon. I’ve been a real pain in the ass throughout, because I’m really lazy, and I would rather simply not do things even if it costs me money. But this is apparently not an option when you’re selling a house.

When I bought the house, there were renters in it, and it looked bad — it had old ratty carpets so dirty they were black and splotches on all the walls and stuff piled from floor to ceiling in every room. I paid over the listing price for it anyway, but apparently most people are more particular than I am.

The main thing that’s been difficult is that you have to coordinate so many different types of people to do so many different types of things, and this always involves a lot of phone calling. The people you are dealing with tend to not be especially precise or communicative about scheduling — they love to say things like, “I should be able to stop by and do that sometime next week.” And then they don’t. Then, too, doing some things relies on other people having already done other things, so each last minute reschedule or failure to show necessitates calling everyone back again and asking them for new commitments that they won’t be meeting anyway. Then, after the work is done, there is often one more small thing that needs to have been done that necessitates getting them back out there (or it was all done wrong and has to be redone).

I don’t know why I’m complaining, because again, my mother did basically all of this. But having to think about it at all has been very depleting.

One thing my realtor said we needed was a stager to augment my furniture with accessories — pillows and artwork and vases and things. I didn’t understand this, because I thought my little house was very attractive as it was: sparsely, simply, and tastefully decorated. But then I saw what the stager did, and I realized that it had looked like shit before and that I have bad taste.

Well, now the house has never looked better. I wish I still lived in it.