Life keeps me busy

My neighbor’s back from her hiking trip so I’m relieved of my cat and garden duty for now.  Raven is happy to have me home, but runs to the door if I’m stepping outside a minute.  He doesn’t want me to leave him home.  He really enjoyed his visits across the street.

Raven

We held an open house for agents last week because we were inundated by calls from them wanting to preview the house for possible clients.  My husband is nicer than I am, I guess, because he wanted to do it.  I have no warm fuzzy feeling when it comes to real estate people.  I guess time will tell if they really have a client or not.  I’m always skeptical.

I’ve been back in the garage and doing house repairs.  The laundry faucet sprung a leak and flooded the cabinet below and under the washer and dryer, so we had quite a mess to clean up.  Why does all this kind of stuff happen around midnight?  My husband wasn’t a happy camper because the last thing he wants to do at that time of night is pull out the washer and dryer and take stuff out from under the sink to clean up the mess.  Plus, we were both upset at having to replace the faucet.

Yesterday, on the way back from lunch with some friends, we stopped at Home Depot and bought a new faucet, so we put it in today.  Naturally, with the two of us doing the repair, it took half the day.

I’m not sure where the weekend went, but here we are almost facing Monday again.  Have a great week everyone.

Real Estate People

clipart

Okay, my intention isn’t to insult you if you happen to be a real estate person, but I have to say I have very little respect for realtors as a whole.  Why is it they won’t listen?  As you know, if you follow my blog, we have our house for sale.  We’re selling it ourselves and want to do it this way.  We’ve sold homes and land by owner in the past.  We know the rules, have a good relationship with a title company here, and don’t have a problem with this.  We’ve made it clear we’ll work with a realtor who brings us a legitimate buyer, but we don’t want to list the house, thank you.

We’ve had a sign professionally made, put up our own website for the house, had photos professionally taken and post ads for the house in good places on a daily basis.  Unfortunately, realtors troll these places now looking for homes for sale by owner.  We are inundated with calls.  So my husband says, “Why don’t we have a day with limited hours that we have the house open to any realtors who are bugging us – but only if they will work with us controlling the situation and have qualified buyers?”  Many times the real estate people say they want to preview the house first, as if they can’t do that by looking at the photos of every room from various angles and landscaping front and back.

Well today was that day.  And the first thing the people want you to do is give them a listing on the house.  We are upfront in our desire to sell it by owner.  Why would we change our mind?  They always seem to think we will, which is annoying.  Most of our discussions go back to this question throughout the house tour and talking afterward, which is an adamant no.

We even had a young guy, probably very new to real estate, ask us if we actually lived here?  What?  He said our house was too clean and orderly and how do we manage to keep it that way.  Am I that good a housekeeper?  Really?  I didn’t think so.

This whole venture was probably a waste of time, but we did it so we’ll see if anything comes of it in the future.