Our latest twist in the house selling/buying saga:

The Laundry Debacle.

Less than 2 years ago I bought a new front loading LG washer and an LG dryer with a steam cycle. I LOVED those things. Loved. Seriously never thought one could love one’s laundry-doing appliances, but I did. Not only did they work awesomely but they also sang me a song. It goes like this:

Have you ever heard a happier tune than that?

It made me smile every. single. time. I heard it.

When we put the house on the market I insisted that we take the washer and dryer with us. The buyers insisted we include them with the house. It was almost the undoing of the whole deal. (On the first offer, that was so low as to be ridiculously laughable, they massively underbid AND asked for BOTH the washer/dryer AND our kids’ playground {which we also intended to move}. Those people had some gall. They also got pretty much everything they wanted.)

You guys, I know there’s probably some kind of psycho-emotional explanation beyond the stupid washer and dryer, but I lost sleep and CRIED over the loss of my washer and dryer. CRIED.

Okay, moving on to the new house…

The washer (a front load, but obviously older than mine) and dryer were to “convey” with the house. “It’s standard” our realtors told us, when I whined about the loss of my beloved LG’s. It was also spelled out in the contract.

Tuesday we closed on the house. A couple of hours later we had the walk through.

{Long Aside Here: I don’t understand the point of a final walk through AFTER the house has already closed. Even if something is wrong, at that point what can you do? Also, what is with having the previous owners give the new owners a tour? Okay, in theory it’s nice or whatever, but in reality it means your first real look at the house (sans their furniture) is colored by THEIR memories and narration, thereby making it that much harder to think of the house as YOURS. In addition, should you notice something amiss, it would be horribly awkward to say anything if you happen to be a manner-driven people pleaser such as myself.}

Guess what wasn’t in the house?

The washer and dryer.

Now I admit, my first thought upon seeing an empty space where a washer and dryer should be was “HA! Now Hubby has to let me buy my LG washer and dryer!!”

Also, I didn’t remember that it was written into the contract that those should have conveyed. I thought it was just one of those things that everyone assumed. And Hubby walked right past the same empty space and didn’t say a thing.

So here we are. Gave away the two appliances I loved the most and got NOTHING in return.

Irony much?

Not knowing what else to do (and frankly, really wanting to do it anyway) I set about buying myself a new LG washer and dryer ASAP.

Problem: While one can BUY said appliances at any number of places online and in stores, it is quite another thing to actually have them DELIVERED in any kind of timely fashion. The ones I really wanted were not available for delivery until mid-June at the earliest.
Yeah, no laundry for 2-3 weeks is SO not an option. I had to settle for more basic models which have even less features than my last ones, despite being two years newer. But, they still play the song! (I’m holding on to the positives here people)

The part that annoys me the most isn’t that they took their washer/dryer – goodness knows out of everyone on the planet I of all people can understand that! — but since it was in the freaking contract that we were supposed to get them we had NO notice for shopping/delivery and thus I end up having to settle rather than getting the ones I really want. (and, for the record, the ones I really wanted were on sale for LESS than the ones I got).

I am so over this whole moving thing. Kind of unfortunate given that a giant truck filled with zillions of boxes to unpack will be arriving at my new house tomorrow, huh? Ha ha. At this point, I’m totally looking forward to that truck and all those boxes because it means we will be out of this temporary housing purgatory at long last.

I. Can’t. Wait.

I am spoiled. I know this. Many people live in similar fashion all the time, nothing temporary about it, and are perfectly happy and comfortable. That said, were we to suddenly see a reduction in our family’s income, I would be lobbying to live in the old rambler in the sticks, not the apartment in town. I had a t-shirt when I was a little girl, it had a picture of John Denver wearing those round Lennon-style glasses and it said in a cheesy 70′s rainbow-colored bubble font, “Thank God I’m a country girl”. And I am. I like wide open spaces and room to breathe and to hear myself think.

That said, we are adapting to this temporary lifestyle. We take long walks on the nearby trail to neighborhood playgrounds where the kids can get a little bit of their energy out. I come up with all sorts of plans that take us out of the apartment all day on the weekends so that when Monday comes around I can face another week of close-quarter homeschooling. And I bought the kids Lego Heroica, a kid version of a role-playing game as a “reward” (for staying in bed and going to sleep. Oh the bar is set so very low these days). It’s supposed to be a very involved game that can be played for hours and in many different ways. Here’s hoping.

And something occured to me, not for the first time, this afternoon. As hard as this time is, it’s also a blessing. Because my older son, who can easily spend most of a day on the computer in his room at home, is now parked at the only desk, in the middle of the living room. This is quite possibly the most time I’ve spent with him since he was about four years old. And you know, he’s really fun to hang out with, in his own quiet way. And at lunch every day the four of us sit down together and I pull up a Bill Nye The Science Guy episode that is somehow tangentally related to something one of the kids is learning and we all watch and laugh together and I think, we will always remember this fondly. Years from now one of us will say something like “Science Rules” and we’ll all laugh at the inside joke and remember our homeschool lunches.

So yeah, I’m anxious to get past this in-between time with all the house selling/ house buying stress and apartment living and homeschooling out of necessity without a curriculum; but it ain’t all bad. I bet there will even be a day, maybe years from now, when the kids are grown and out on their own and I’ll think “I should have enjoyed that time more.” Maybe.

They picked ours.

Their realtor said the pictures and letter (our realtor wrote, about us) swayed them.

I am doing the Happy Dance.

Perhaps we should have added a clause promising our bid would cause Humberdink “humiliations galore!”…

We don’t know about the house that we put an offer on yet. What we do know is there are at least two other offers, with more people clamoring to see the house and make offers. The sellers have said they will stop accepting offers at 10am tomorrow and make a decision at 11:30. We ended up putting together an offer that was significantly OVER list price. Our agent said the house was clearly underpriced – the seller’s agent is a relative and apparently doesn’t really know the local market all that well. So we were fine offering more, because it was still within our budget. Also, our offer is contingent on the sale (or rather now, on the closing) of our house, and the other offers are noncontingent. The selling agent told our agent the contingency made the sellers “nervous”. Can’t say as I blame them, but there’s not much we can do about it. We’ll either get the house, or we won’t. There’s other houses. It will be okay either way.

Still, doesn’t it seem like I have the worst real estate ju-ju ever? Not that I believe in ju-ju. Just sayin’.

This apartment is tiny. I caught Hubby’s cold and was so tired and achy today it was all I could do to school the kids; going for a long walk was out of the question. The kids have lost x-box and ds privileges and spider man comic books because of sneaky late night misbehavior; Zeeb can’t read the library ebooks I put on my ipad for him because he switched over to a game the second I turned my back. There has to be a better way to discipline them that doesn’t result in me feeling even more punished than they do. But if so, I don’t know what it is.

These are light and momentary troubles. Things will get better. Soon, I hope. In the meantime, I’m keeping these guys on repeat.

How cranky can anyone be while singing along to “What a Friend We Have In Jesus?”

That seemed to do the trick. Hubby and agent talked and came up with some sort of compromise where she gets a higher percentage of the agent fee (which is paid by his work, so doesn’t come out of our pocket) and then kicks in some of the $$ that the buyers seem unwilling or unable to pay to get to a reasonable price. All well and good. (well, not really good, but good enough) Except we haven’t heard back from the buyers yet. She said “Monday or Tuesday” and this morning she emailed Hubby and said she still hadn’t heard from them. Annoying.

Meanwhile…

I’m beginning to get the hang of the homeschooling. The trick, I found, was to plan A~’s work out the night before and email it to him. I don’t have to do a lot of prep, but I have to look where he’s at in the textbook, assign the reading and problems/questions, etc. But also because he’s basically working out of textbooks, I like to find lectures that correspond to what he’s learning. Which is where the magic of the internet is so very awesome and amazing. Did you know that Yale posts some of their classes/lectures online? SO. Cool. He’s learning about the middle ages from a Yale professor. Also Dante’s inferno. And the Khan Academy gave him a hand with Algebra 2 last week. Oh and I’m also getting an assist from K, my 2nd year English major who went positively giddy at the idea of “teaching” her brother Dante and Shakespeare. She emailed him his writing assignments for the week. Love that kid, so much.

Zeeb is a lot harder. He’s not quite up to Yale lectures yet. Ha ha. Even the Khan academy is almost over his head. And most of last week I didn’t have a working printer, so I had no way to print any worksheets for him. It was not good. However, I did find some pretty useful apps for my newly aquired (refurbished) Ipad. Boy was that ever a good purchase. And I broke down and rejoined JumpStart online to get him a variety of academic-type activities. (It’s a pretty good program, but we had a heck of a time cancelling the subscription before). And then I picked up a couple of workbooks over the weekend. So we should get by. But I still want him back in public school, ASAP.

One of the side effects of all three kids home all day every day is that R and Zeeb are getting into a LOT of trouble. Bickering, finding mischief, waking up at 3am to play DS… you name it.

By Saturday, I was desperate to get out of the house. I’d found a local agent to help us look for houses to rent and/or buy. He set up a couple of showings for that morning. The house for sale was quirky, in a kind of cool way, but with very little outdoor space and on a busy street. The house for rent had white carpet that the owner was “very particular” about and the tiny backyard was on a golf fairway where my dog would undoubtedly bark at every golfer walking by. Obvs not the house for us. After we went to the golf clubhouse (where our family was sadly under-dressed) for some lunch and to talk strategy, we parted ways and I felt more frustrated than ever. There just aren’t a lot of good options for renting.

Then we tried to go to the library. Tried being the key word here. We had a library card from before we moved, but it didn’t work. So there I was, surrounded by books in my favorite familiar “home” library, and I couldn’t check out a thing. I felt a little like Ebeneezer, gazing at his past, powerless to interact with it in any useful way.

By the time we got home I was an angsty crying mess. Husband left to get his haircut, A took the dog for a very long walk, the kids got sent to their room to read and not bug mommy and I sat in the farthest away corner I could find and cried.

Thank God for Sunday.

Sunday we went to church. It was really really good. Kind of more of a mega church than we generally go to, but since we don’t know where we’ll end up, we weren’t looking for a new home church so much as a place to worship and hear God’s word. We got both in spades. And the take away message for Hubby and I was “If you are stressing, you are putting yourself in God’s place. That is a sin. Knock it off.” (Mind you, the pastor said it MUCH better than that, but that’s my summary.) It was exactly the message and perspective we needed.

And then, we went to the mall. Retail therapy anyone? There’s nothing like being back in your “home” mall, just whiling away the afternoon, no particular purpose in mind, just popping in to the Disney store and the Lego store and anywhere else that makes us happy. Oh and I bought a purse. Because I officialy hate the one I got a Kohls. Too small and yet somehow everything gets lost in it. I got this big bright colorful springy bag at Penny’s that Hubby and the kids thought was ridiculous (“get something neutral! You’ll get tired of that!”) and that made me want it more. Sometimes, a woman just needs a little bit of whimsy in her life.

After all that, I was feeling a lot better. And then, the day got even better.

I found a house. It just came on the market Sunday morning and our agent hadn’t even seen it. It’s in a good neighborhood, near one of my preferred schools, about two blocks from a really good running/biking trail. It doesn’t so much have the five bedrooms we need, but we can convert the den and 1/2 bath into a “guest suite” – or at least that’s the plan. No basement (basements don’t do well in the soggy NW) but a big bonus room over the garage. And a good price. All good things. The stressful part comes in where the market here just very recently turned and suddenly the good houses are going super crazy ridiculous fast. (Remember the “quirky” house on the busy street we looked at Saturday? It got an offer from the people who looked at it after us. I swear, EVERYBODY has better real estate juju than I do.) So anyway, we’re putting in an offer, full price, contingent on our house selling. And crossing our fingers no one offers over full price, or full price with no contingencies.

Holy Cow.

While I was writing this long saga, Hubby got an email from our VA agent. Supposedly she’s writing a new offer with the buyers tomorrow. It would have to be really awful for us to turn it down.

There are so very many IFs in front of us right now, but it is conceivably possible we could be in a house by June. And that? Would be awesome.

Ed links: Open Yale Courses
Khan Academy
IPad apps: Math Blaster Hyperblast (good “reward” game after Zeeb does his math work)
The Opposites (a vocab game)
Hungry Fish (a math game that R is totally addicted to)
My First Classical Music App (Zeeb asked if we could have a “music” class like had at school. Voila!)

Homeschooling moms… any good websites I’m missing?
What Ipad apps do your kids love?
I can use all the help I can get!!

Let me put that in perspective. We arrived safely at our destination after five and a half days of driving cross-country. We have a (temporary) roof over our heads. The two pets are still alive and my dog is even sitting at my feet as I type.

Obviously, things could be worse.

However.

The idjits in the relo dept of hubby’s work gave us temp housing that is not only NOT in the right school district, but is also a two hour bus ride from his office. (about a 45-60 minute drive, but not many buses get out this way). This means two things:

1. I can’t enroll Zeeb in school. I mean, I could, but we have no intention of staying in this area and how mean would it be to make him change schools TWICE in one year? I am going to be homeschooling A and R, but I was not intending to school Zeeb. Let’s just say that the two of us do not work well together.

2. Hubby is renting a car, because we need a car at “home” and he needs a way to get to work in under 2 hours every day.

There’s two solutions to our current problem. 1. Rent a house in the right area. or 2. Buy a house in the right area.
Unfortunately, it appears it is not currently possible to rent (nothing on C’s list) and it’s definitely not possible to buy, being as how our house has not sold.

Which brings me to the real reason I want to curl up in a ball and hide from the world for a while.

Our realtor has sold us up the river. And I totally should have seen it coming and we definitely should not have been wooed by her poetic postcards.

See, after she (and another, unrelated realtor) told us that we could get X amount for our house when she was trying to get our business, then when it came time to list she said, I think you should ask Y amount (which was lower than X amount) and now that she’s brought in her very own buyer for our house, she thinks we can only get Z amount. And Z amount? Let me tell you about Z amount. Here, I’ll use an equation.

Z = Y – A Truckload of $$ – the washer and dryer – the playground – $15000 in closing costs = LESS than we paid for the house, four years ago when the market was at it’s lowest and BEFORE we paid 20K to redo the kitchen and 6K to paint the exterior of the house.

Z is such a ridiculous pathetic amount that were I in a better mood and not talking about my freaking HOUSE I would be laughing my @ss off.

And when I told her as much on the phone yesterday she said, “Well, houses in your range are just not selling. I think it’s the best you can do.”

REALLY? REALLY???? Funny, because what I know is that in our town house prices are UP and it is by definition a SELLERS MARKET. And if that is what she thought, why on EARTH did she tell us something wildly different when she was trolling for our business???

OMGosh I think I hate the woman right now. God forgive me.

Yes, I am insulted and mad about this offer. But I’m more mad at the realization that our realtor is entirely working for the buyer and has every intention of screwing us. And, furthermore, has NO intention of representing our needs from here on out.

I want to fire her. Like yesterday. But I don’t think we can, because Hubby says the contract we signed says she represents us until June 30th. Is that true? Is there no way out? Because I seriously have zero trust or respect for her and don’t know how on earth we can continue like this.

I feel trapped, frustrated, betrayed and so freaking tired. There is no space, no food, no grass to walk my dog and I am rapidly going nuts. Oh and did I mention that Hubby picked up a full-fledged freaking Man Cold and keeps reporting to me every twenty minutes what his stinking temperature is?

I knew this transtion was going to be stressful and difficult. I knew that. I just didn’t anticipate it being this stressful and difficult.

I confess, it snuck up on me, again. After ten years, you’d think I’d be more on top of things. But then I have been a little busy, what with the listing a house, picking out colleges, and getting ready to move cross country and all. So, my apologies. I know you’ve been dying to shop for Cambodian New Year gear for weeks now, and were almost to the point of despair. Well, despair no longer, my friend.

Cambodian year of the Dragon Tee by Bykota

2012 Cambodian New Year Square Stickers To Share by Bykota

Happy New Year, Dragon! by Bykota

The store is stocked, it is time to shop!!

I was in dire need of new spring clothes for Easter and, well, just life. I am not good at shopping. I can’t make outfits and I have like no sense of style and I get bored. But I was determined. And Kohl’s had an almost endless supply of options. And yet, in the end I could not find a single pair of pants I liked. They didn’t have my size, or there were weird sparkly sequins on the back pockets, or the pants were too fancy. I’m a simple girl, I don’t need fancy pants. Also, I bought a dress. Which I know Hubby will want me to wear for Easter and any other occasion he can dream up. It’s weird how much he wants me to wear dresses. About as much I don’t want to wear them. June Cleaver I most certainly am not.

I also got a couple pairs of pants for R and two shirts for A~, a pair of heeled sandals for me, a strapless bra, and a new purse. DUDE purses are expensive.

This is a goodly amount of stuff, right? But still, I was STUNNED when she rang it up and the total came over $400. Like knock me over with a feather, help me catch my breath, stunned. I played it all cool, whipping out my credit card like it was nothing, while mentally planning to return half of what I bought. For one thing, I didn’t realize the stupid bra was $36. That is WAY too much for a bra. Don’t know why I didn’t just have her take it back right there. Too stunned, I think.

And this is why I never go shopping and never have anything good to wear for Easter or any other nice-dressing type day. Because in my head it’s still 1982 and all that stuff would never come close to $400. I am so old. Also cheap, apparently.

Anyway it was surprisingly easy to kill the entire day at Kohls (and Starbucks. We had to stop there first, to fuel up.) And now I am home and my house is clean and the cat is walking around all twitchy like and the dog barked at every corner of the house because it smells like strangers. And I sure hope some agent is calling one of his buyers and saying “You MUST go look at this house!”

Did I tell you how our agent said the “facade” of our house is keeping people from wanting it? It’s a Dutch Colonial. Apologies to anyone who’s a fan of that style, but it is U-G-L-Y. But we did give it a new paint job just last month with more updated colors and the plant beds are SO much better than they were when we moved in, so I sort of hoped all that would off-set the Dutch Colonial-ness of it. Also, she says you can’t tell from the outside how big the house actually is. Which was actually a positive to me. I don’t like to be all uppity. People around here? Like nothing better than to be uppity. They want their house to scream MCMANSION from the hilltops. Which is bad news for us. So now I am praying for some humble, yet well funded family to come along and see all that’s good about the house. It’s so much better than it was when we bought it almost 4 years ago.

Hey, I never showed you the kitchen, did I? Here, I’ll paste in the photo our realtor took:

Isn’t it pretty? Do you remember what it looked like before?? Let me refresh your memory:

Now if we were stupid enough to buy the house with that kitchen, shouldn’t someone be willing to look past the facade and buy our house with it’s new pretty kitchen?

Fingers crossed. The good news is, unlike well, pretty much everywhere else, we have a very “active” market here right now, and prices are even going up a tiny bit. So, if we can manage to shed the bad house-selling juju that seems to follow us from house to house, we should be able to unload this place someday soon(ish).

And wow was this long and rambly and all over the place. Sorry, apparently I needed to talk. Thanks for listening.

Our agent’s assistant called at 3:30 and said a realtor wanted to come by for a showing “Between four and six.”

Seriously? A 2 hour window?

“He says he’s planning to go to your house second. So probably around 4:20.”

Okay, that’s do-able.

Pile two kids and a dog in the car, and go to the bus stop early to wait for Zeeb. He gets off the bus, we sit in the car a bit more. 4:30. No one looking realtor-ish has driven past us (we wait at the corner of our street. They can’t get to our house without going past us.) So we drive to Starbucks to get the kids a snack.

Sit outside, enjoy our Starbucks, Zeeb does some of his homework. A~ is eager to go back home, he didn’t bring all his homework along. It’s after 5, surely they’ve come and gone by now.

Get back to the house around 5:30. I go in first, to look for the telltale business card that all realtors leave when they go to a house for a showing.

No card.

Back to the car, drive to the church parking lot at the corner to wait some more. Six o’clock, we go home.

Still no card.

In summary: They make us leave our house for two hours, during the prime time of homework and dinner preparations and they never even freaking SHOWED UP.

That? Is just plain rude.