How could I have neglected my blog for this long?  To my loyal readers, though you may be few, my sincerest apologies.  The past few months have been busy with life things, weddings to perform, and many little trips with the Hubs.  You cannot imagine how crazy my life has been.  Or maybe you can.  How many of you have tried to sell your home?

My husband and I go to open houses.  It’s open. It’s a house. We want a house.  We started looking even before we got married to see what was out there.  We would dream of a big yard and tons of space with a basement for me and a garage for him.  It was fun!  It’s actually comical that I now say it was fun.  I cannot imagine real estate and fun to ever be in the same sentence again.

 

We own a condo with 1 bedroom and 1.5 bathrooms; it has two terraces, lots of space and is outside a bus stop into the city.  You couldn’t ask for a better locale.  Hubs bought it when we first started dating so it was the perfect place for us to live afterwards; we even got engaged right in our living room.  It’s the perfect spot for two but when you are recently married you think about becoming three. Hello!  Everyone has this convo before and after they are married—- if not, you MUST! When do we want kids? How many do we want? Where do we want the kids to go to school?  So here we are thinking of branching out eventually and are considering our options. What towns do we like? Where is it convenient for us to commute to work? Will we both work? The list goes on forever but the first step is to have a home to bring these imaginary kids up in.  So we choose towns and start looking.

 

In New Jersey you have three parts: North, Central, and South.  Central and South Jersey are like their own little countries, beautiful in their own right but different. The North Jersey I know is like an annex of Manhattan, like the other borough.  We commute to the city, we all complain about traffic, we drive to our malls, we pay a lot in taxes, and we all pay shit tons of money to own homes in this primo location. Why am I talking about this? Oh yeah, because for me, there really isn’t anywhere I could imagine living (except Orlando!).

 

Hubs and I start the search and we are going to open houses every weekend.  The amount of crap on the market is amazing.  People, put your clothes away when people are coming to look at your homes!  Real estate agents tell you to put away personal touches like pictures and knick knacks but what they should do is just walk around with a dust buster.  I cannot tell you the amount of houses we saw that were so dirty and smelly I couldn’t imagine living there.  Take this really nice and BIG house that smelled like cat piss.  The cat jumped up on the kitchen counter, licked its private parts, and I wanted to run away. At one of these open houses, we eventually met a real estate agent we liked and decided to have him bring us around to see some places.  He was helpful and we thought when we were ready he could help us. We were getting the fever and couldn’t wait to move.  We though we would wait until beginning of 2015 and then make it happen.

 

One day we were looking on our own at an open house and we found “the house.” It was perfect but a mess of bad paint and poor spackle.  It has its issues but we knew this was it.  Screw 2015 let’s do this! We called up the real estate guy, listed our condo, and put a bid on this house with some stipulations.  We had questions as anyone should.  I wish it were like Million Dollar Listing where it all happens in a week’s time and you go back and forth on the phone to get ‘er done faster.  Not the case, folks.  We finally heard back from them that they were accepting our offer TEN DAYS LATER.  Usual time is about 48 hours.  I kid you not, Hubs and I were losing our minds.  We were snapping at each other and getting so stressed out.  I don’t have panic attacks often but when I do, stand back!  I lost my shit.  Hubs took care of me like he always does but there and then we made a truce to cool down about this nonsense and take it one day at a time.

 

But yay although it took forever our offer was accepted!  THE HOUSE would be ours if we could just sell our place.    IF. THE BIG IF.  I already told you our place was great.  The same kind of place above us was listed for $30K more so why wasn’t ours selling?  Ours was a steal. I’ll tell you why: the condo market just sucks.  You really need to have the right person come at the right time with the right money.  Without going into too much detail, we let our house go.  It was heartbreaking but it was definitely a relief in some ways.  We knew it wasn’t happening right now so we decided to keep looking and hoping.

 

We chose our real estate agent from a meeting at an open house.  He was personable and easy to relate to.  Later on, we found out that it was because he could relate to us- he was clueless too.  As nice as he is, picking someone knowledgable who can guide you through this shit show is necessary.

 

A few weeks went by and we considered lowering our price.  THE HOUSE owners must have had the same idea.  They lowered. And then again.  And then asked us for final offer.  That means that they are either bluffing OR there are multiple parties interested and they want to see who will make the best deal. How could we refuse? This was THE house.  We made an offer and a good one AND lowered our price.  We were the only offer so technically we are right back where we started with THE HOUSE.

 

Our place? Our place is still sitting on the market. All our agent tries to do is get us to lower the price.  We’ve been promoting it any which way we can but we have no idea what the future may bring. It’s a horrible land of limbo lollapalooza.

 

Now my dear readers you can see why I haven’t written.  I have not been in the right place or the right time.  My head is reeling with what ifs and it’s so disconcerting.  I don’t even know if there is such a thing as the right time and place.  This delay, this inability to sell, makes me question so many things about our great life together.  Will my career ever be resurrected? Will we ever have kids?  Will we ever have outdoor BBQs and huge dinner parties? Will we ever mow our own grass? Can we be happy staying here? Months later and I still don’t know the answers to these questions.  To quote Sheryl Crow, “no one said it would be easy, but no one said it’d be this hard.”

 

For now, I am burying a St. Joseph statue, the patron saint of real estate, in my tomato plant.  I’m not an overly religious person but please everyone, pray for us.

 

For more positive posts, stay tuned. I’m convincing myself that “gray skies are gonna clear up!”