Did I Pass a Gas Station?

Firesign Theater aficionados will reply with, "No, but the fox did. Squeeze him right there; maybe he'll pass another one." And I'm sitting here, feeling the relief of having passed at least a gas station, if not an entire Kwik-E-Mart.

It is finished. Doug, a longtime friend of Evan and a one-man contracting company, just left after doing the final painting (window trim and front door) and replacing the toilet guts upstairs. He started work around 10 this morning. Realtor Jan stopped in around 11 to pick up the keys to put in the lock box out front.

By this afternoon, the MLS listing for my house had shown up on Realtor.com, and it should be on Zillow by tomorrow. So it's official: the house is publicly for salex.

I told Jan I'm up for showing the house anytime with about 30 minutes warning. So now I have to keep the place clean and picked up, ready to display to the buying public. And my sleep habits will have to go back to a normal circadian rhythm (which they have over this last week). Instead of staying up until 5 or 6 a.m. and sleeping 'til noon or 1 p.m., I'll be rising at 8 or 9 a.m. and going to bed at 1 or 2 a.m.

We were originally going to have an Open House this Sunday, but there's a fairly large storm coming through this weekend, and it looks like Sunday is when the worst of it will hit. So why put out a lot of effort on an open house no one will attend?

So the property is now listed on the MLS, and I will be included in next Thursday's "round-up" of new properties, which is when Realtors tour the properties that came on the market the week before. Then Sunday after next, the open house.

Major fantasy: several buyers start bidding on the property and it ends up selling for over $400,000. Probable reality: we hang out waiting for a serious buyer, I end up taking 350,000 instead of the asking price of 375,000. Reality: in the last six months, similar properties sold for 97.3% of their asking price.

Oh, boy: a whole new set of things to obsess over and to keep my up at night.

But I look around and am very pleased with the place. And I'm hoping some of the design choices I made for the remodel (fixtures, ceiling refinishing, flooring, paint) were good ones.

Come one, come all: come see my lovely home and pocket anything that's not tied down.

Now we wait.