Pit for Sale

After quite the busy week and weekend, our home, which is for sale, had fallen into no state to be shown to any interested parties. In fact, a 4-year-old friend of Chicklet's was over last week and spied me in my bedroom. Standing in the doorway, she took one look around our room and asked:

"How many shoes do you have? And how come your room is a pit?"

***

Ah, what does it matter, we've begun to think. In the last ten or eleven weeks, only one buyer has come to see it.

(Well, there was that other person who tried...but most of us were gone to Charlotte's Web auditions when the realtor called and left a message on our answering machine. When they showed up an hour later, Bantam16, who was babysitting our youngest two, flatly told them no. He's not good with the unexpected, and frankly, due to our concentration on preparing for auditions, our whole house was a pit!)

So we've been talking with our realtor about taking it off the market for awhile. It takes 90 days to "re-set the clock" in the MLS, so why not take it off now, before Charlotte's Web and all the holidays, and put it back on in the New Year?

It was already off the market, in our minds, when a car pulled into the driveway late Sunday afternoon. "Who could that be?" several of us asked each other. We waited expectantly as a woman got out of the driver's seat and approached our door, while the woman in the passenger seat remained in the car. None of us knew her.

"You didn't get my message, then?" she asked pleasantly. We were stumped. Who was this woman?

"I called the number on the listing twice yesterday...."

I found my voice. "Oh, you're a realtor!" (To give us credit, she didn't look like a realtor--the car and the clothing were too modest. And it had been a LONG time since we'd seen one other than our own.)

"Well, listen," she said, smilingly eyeing the large family and its accompanying mess visible from our front doorway. "We'll come back at a better time. Really, it's no problem."

"Oh, that would be great," I said honestly. (Speaking of pits....) "But, please DO come back!"

"Oh, we will," she assured me. Then she leaned in a little closer and said reassuringly, "This one's a long way from buying anything, so really, don't worry about it."

And that's about the most excitement we have had on the home-selling front recently.

With rehearsals this weekend, our usual Sunday in Wisconsin, and dress rehearsals every night next week, this Thursday will be our house's last day in the MLS in 2007. We'll leave our agent's sign up, and it will still be listed for sale on several websites, but we're looking forward to a little less stress in our lives for 3 months or so.

(Though I still keep thinking about what else we need to do to it--especially stripping wallpaper, which we may end up doing in between Charlotte's Web and Thanksgiving. So much for a break!)