One of the things that’s kept me up at nights stressed considering running away to South America busy the past few months has been relocating my family. Not to South America, mind you; just across town.
In the interests of documenting the experience, particularly as evidence against the idea of ever moving again, here’s the story.
The Queen B had been making subtle hints about wanting to move into a bigger house for some time. You know, stuff like making lists of features of her ideal kitchen, or resetting my laptop’s homepage to go to the Rapid City Association of Realtors, or replacing the “Home Sweet Home” welcome mat with one the read “The Craphole My Husband Demanded I Live In.” Little stuff like that.
Her opinion had been that while the current house was a good starter home for a young family, it simply wasn’t big enough for two little girls, visiting grandparents, or hosting cocktail parties. My respective initial responses to those concerns — “We’ve got a spare bedroom one girl could have,” “We’ve got an office with a bed,” and “What is this? The Great Gatsby?” — were met with some incredulity and week of my sleeping on the couch, whereupon I was encouraged to think harder upon these issues.
Of course, the straw that broke the proverbial camel’s back was the Ladybug’s kindergarten. Originally, we were a part of Elementary School X’s boundary, but near the end of 2010 city officials gerrymandered the district lines so that we were suddenly exactly 100 feet out of boundary, which meant the Ladybug would have gone to Elementary School Y. While not going into the details of the difference between the two schools, let’s just say that while school X is a pretty ordinary elementary school, the Ladybug’s new school Y was a little… run down.
(As a useful intuitive comparison between X and Y, remember Sarah Connor’s dream sequence in Terminator 2? Think of the playground before and after. Before: School X. After: School Y.)
So at the start of 2011, we put our house up for sale, and started looking for a new place to live.
The mathematics for the new house were pretty simple. We limited our geographic search to homes within shouting distance of a decent school, lest we be gerrymandered out one more time. Similarly, our finance guy limited our budget to between W and 2W, where W was the current worth of our house. (I’ll leave it as an easy exercise to the reader to prove that there exists at least one prime asking price that would fit into our budget; a much harder problem is proving the existence of an actual homeowner willing to sell for such a price.) The Queen B found a small — but thankfully nonzero — number of homes that fit within these parameters, and so we spent January visiting them.
When it came to choosing an appropriate house, well, that was fairly straightforward too. It turns out that the Queen B started composing the wishlist for her second home approximately a week after we moved into our first one, so the basic contents of our desired home were pretty easy to describe. That being said, finding a house that met all the necessary criteria was a bit of a challenge.
Most of the houses failed by a wide margin. One used home, for example, had a neat multi-level dining room/family room area (which was nice), but instead of a grassy swath of land there was a large concrete-and-rock obstacle course that looked more like an extreme skate-park than a backyard for a pair of little girls. Another home, despite being a new construction, was decorated entirely in ceramic glass cubes, track lighting, wrought iron, and pastel-colored line art; that is to say, it looked like the home of a drug dealer from any episode of Miami Vice. A different new construction was excluded because most of its main rooms — kitchen, dining room, family room, etc — were long, narrow and at right angles to each other, which made the house feel less like comfortable living quarters than like some Ellen Page would have designed for Inception.
Eventually, however, we came to a house in Red Rock Meadows, which is a new housing development on the outskirts of Rapid City. (It is not to be confused with Red Rock Estates, a nearby posh, gated community. In Red Rock Estates, patios open up on a golf course. In Red Rock Meadows, patios open up on a cow pasture. Usually with cows.) The house had an open floor plan (the kitchen, dining, and family rooms are all visible from each other ), a fireplace, a pantry and a laundry room, plus (an added bonus for parents) a master bedroom on the opposite side of the house from the two kids’ rooms. And it was the right color to boot. On the other hand, the basement was entirely unfinished, as was the yard.
Nevertheless, the Queen B felt that this was the house. After talking with the builder (wherein the Queen B managed to haggle the addition of an office and a bathroom downstairs, thus completing her wishlist), we put an offer on it.
The actual selling of the old house, however, got a bit tricky. Specifically, the only way we could produce the funds to buy the new house was by first selling the old one, so we actually put what’s called a contingent offer on the house. Essentially, this meant that the house was ours unless someone could put in a better, immediate bid, in which case we would have 48 hours to pay up on our offer by whatever means (selling kidneys, Faustian bargains, etc) necessary.
Unfortunately, what with us trying to sell our house in the dead of winter in the middle of a tough economic year, it occurred to us that the only way someone would by our house would be contingent on selling theirs and thus, proceeding by induction, contingent on an infinite regress of home sales, whence we’d never move. Unless, of course, someone simply had enough dough to purchase one of the houses one which our sale depended… except, of course, the one house we wanted to by. It’s a meta-consumer nightmare.
None of this, of course, phased our realtor, who I suspect once played the part of “Pollyana” and never realized the show had ended. She happily oooohed and ahhhhed at our house, dancing about the place, taking pictures and writing up real-estate descriptions of it that made it sound as if had been built out of rainbows and gum drops. “I give it 100 days on the market and it’ll sell” she breezily said, and then proceeded to schedule open houses for us every Sunday for the next 100 days.
If you’ve never thrown an open house, let me be clear with you: it is a miserable experience. First off, your house needs not to be just clean, but immaculately clean. On this subject, Realtor Pollyanna said “it should look so clean that buyers would want to eat right off the floor.” (However, on the related subject of why we would sell our home to a bunch of savages who hadn’t heard of tables or place settings she remained undecided.) Keeping a house spotless is difficult enough by itself, but add two little girls (the smaller of whom who fancies herself as a bipedal wrecking ball) and you’ve got damn near impossible.
However, it’s not enough that the house simply be clean; it also must be “staged.” In other words, the house needs to be decorated tastefully enough so as to be inviting, but minimally enough as to give the impression that no one actually lives there. Essentially, you have to decorate your house in such a way that potential buyers will subconsciously see their own stuff in its place, like a reverse Rorschach test. The Queen B went the extra mile and actually baked cookies before each and every open house, so as to permeate the place with the smell of chocolate chip cookies, which she hoped would subconsciously appeal to either their sense of nostalgia or their crippling diabetes.
Worse, during the three-hour blocks set aside for the open house, you’re not actually allowed to be in it, sort of like a reverse curfew. Normally this wouldn’t be a problem; indeed, it’s a fairly good excuse to have a nice Sunday afternoon outing with the family. But in the middle of winter, when temperatures routinely dipped to single digits and the wind howled at upwards of twenty miles per hour, a Sunday afternoon outing feels less like an episode of The Waltons than Survivor: Antarctica.
But my family freezing our collective cojones off (well, in the interests of biological correctness, my cojones off) in the middle of winter was only half the problem: everybody else’s cojones were suffering the same fate too. Who wants to go the housing equivalent of window shopping if you’re likely to get frostbite and lose a couple of fingers in the process (the Queen B’s delicious fresh-made cookies notwithstanding)? Indeed, over the course of two months’ worth of open houses, we maybe had ten or twelve takers, and most of those weren’t house shopping, but simply looking for temporary shelter from the weekly blizzard.
Amazingly enough, about one hundred days (give or take a week) after we put the house up, we had a taker: a newly divorced, recently moved dad. Our realtor Pollyanna called us up with the good news (that we had an interested party will to put an offer — a real one, not the limbo-inducing contingent kind! — on our house), which she then cheerfully followed with “we’ll just have to see if the bank will finance him to buy it.”
A day later, we found out the first bank said no.
The day after that, we found out a second bank said no.
The day after that, we found out he was scouting a third bank, who said they’d have an answer for him (and by proxy, us) in two days.
That very same day, another family put an offer on our dream house, starting up the 48-hour countdown to buy.
So, to summarize: after three months of absolutely nothing happening in the sale of either our new dreamhouse or our old (nightmare?)house, our ability to move on either suddenly boiled down to a single decision being made within 48 hours.
Because home-buying isn’t stressful enough.
…to be continued
