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Charlie Hatton
Watertown, MA
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I may have mentioned (ad nauseum) that my wife and I are in the process of selling our house. We've never sold a house before, having popped our proverbial real estate cherry on our current abode.
(No. Don't try and picture that. You're only going to hurt yourself.)
Not knowing quite what to expect from the process, we naturally expected the very worst. We figured we'd wind up with seller agents without the requisite experience -- "What is this 'condominium' word you keep saying?" -- bloodthirsty cutthroat agents on the other ends, and ridiculously difficult buyers, if any at all.
"We braced ourselves to have the house spend months on the market with zero interest, then to endure a contentious negotiation where we'd be forced to give up half our furniture, the car, the dog and a rented parking spot in exchange for a tiny fraction of our asking price."
We braced ourselves to have the house spend months on the market with zero interest, then to endure a contentious negotiation where we'd be forced to give up half our furniture, the car, the dog and a rented parking spot in exchange for a tiny fraction of our asking price. Meanwhile, we'd spend the sale proceeds, our life savings and a hefty loan to squeeze into a ramshackle crapshack studio thirty miles outside of town, after spending six months living out of an overcramped storage bin because none of the real estate sharks would deign to sell us a place.
Hey, we both saw The Money Pit. We know how this real estate dealie works.
Now, I don't want to jinx anything before all the papers are signed and the keys are exchanged, but so far, it looks as if we'll have a somewhat smoother ride than expected on the home-moving train. In fact, you could say this train's been an express, with comfy seats and lots of room and a nice dining car, in case you need a snack. Also, the booze is free and the conductor comes by to give foot rubs every half hour or so. And she's Swedish, so that's a nice touch. I couldn't choo-choo-choose a smoother transition. So far.
Like I said, I don't want to jinx this.
So I won't go into detail about our current situation, other than to say that we have both a party interested in buying our house and another party willing to sell us their place, with paperwork already in progress for both transactions. And the new place is a condo, which we really wanted -- and in our old stomping (and renting) grounds in Brookline, which was also our strong preference for location, location, location this time around. You might glean these not-so-secret housing desires from a post I wrote around four-and-a-half years ago, after we'd been in our current joint for maybe eighteen months or so:
Antennae on the Potato Salad? That's a Paddlin'!
Note the wistful longings for life back in 'walking territory', and where we don't mow our own yard or worry ourselves about the shade of paint on the building's exterior. If all goes well, we'll be back to our old ways by the end of the summer. I've got six fingers and four toes crossed that everything goes to plan without a hitch. Because if this train derails, we'll be back in that ramshackle studio somewhere on the Maine border, wondering where the hell all our money went and what our dog and car and dining room table are up to these days.
And I'm really hoping to avoid that. Keep this engine on the tracks, conductor. And don't be afraid to work the pinky toes down there. I want to enjoy this ride.
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