I speak not of divorce, but of the joyous process of opening one's home to strangers and allowing them to go through it, commenting on your life and living style in order to sell the damn thing. My house has been open for a grand total of about three weeks. Only one person has seen it. There have been no offers.
Today my realtor had a realtor lunch to get other realtors to look at the house. I did not know what a realtor lunch was before today, but had assumed it was to generate a greater interest and knowledge in my house. I assumed wrong.
It seems that the purpose for this program was to get other realtors to look at my house and find new ways to insult me, and offer a variety of non-specific suggestions to help my house sell better.
For example, a "clean smell" would improve my house alot. I do not have central air, and the extreme heat coupled with the somewhat ineffective window units sometimes lend a certain scent to my (even clean) bathroom, but I am unsure really about how to give my house a clean smell otherwise. I have invested in three lovely plug in room scents, I've used pet fresh on the carpets in the last 48 hours, and I've also cleaned the bathroom and kitchen in the same time frame. Hell, I even got rid of my cat and sprayed and scrubbed down the basement with bleach twice. How else am I supposed to make my house smell "clean"?
On top of this, it was suggested that I do some "sprucing up" in my house. Perhaps none of them, or you, know this, but I have been sprucing this house up every spare moment I have had for the LAST NINE MONTHS!! Every room on the top floor and one of the ones on the first have had the plaster repaired and been repainted. The kitchen has been refloored. The toilet has been replaced. The basement has not only been bleached, but almost everything previously in the basement has been thrown out or packed up into neatly stacked boxes. A worn out and smelly carpet was removed from a bedroom, revealing a worn out wooden floor, which at least doesn't smell. I'm not sure how much more "sprucing" I have time to do, let alone if there is any I can afford, since I am borrowing from my fairly meager savings in order to eat and pay the mortgage.
The most annoying, and the most anger-inducing comment by far, I believe, is that my house is not "move-in" or "live in" ready. My house is not "live in" ready? Is this true? For god's sake, I have been living here for the past four years and it looks a good sight better than it ever has. What kind of a troglydite must I be to live in this filth? What right do they have to tell me that my home, which has all the new work on it that I previously mentioned, is not liveable? Granted, the bedrooms could use new carpet, and much of the wood in the house could benefit from a stripping and sanding, but all the systems work. All of the walls are painted, and none of them are sporting cracks.
The vagaries of real estate piss me off. A house across the street, in worse condition than this, sold for 30 grand more than I'm asking last summer.
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