For Sale: 1 Puppy

My most recent puppy, Ralphie, just celebrated his first year as part of our family. It might be his last year too.

Now don't get me wrong, Ralphie is fulfilling many of his duties quite well. He is really good at cleaning

and being cute in general. That is the function of both of my puppies: cuteness and stress relief.

There are very few things more stress relieving than cuddling your puppies. They look at you with their cute little eyes and you know they are thinking the same thing you are: when are we going to eat next. 

Both of my dogs have been well drilled on the virtues of cuteness and being stress relievers. But Ralphie is still learning and struggling with these concepts. Just like all dogs, Ralphie loves to chew on things - anything really. My hair, my other dog, the couch, nothing is really too big or too inappropriate for Ralphie to approach with a gleaming eye and biting jaw. 

Ralphie is also attracted to shiny things, which is what got him into trouble here. 

A couple of weeks ago, I was suffering from a cold. And, as all teachers know, half the time it is just easier to go to class with a cold than stay home and deal with all the lesson plans and other hurdle that come with staying home. So when I did get home, I immediately took my puppies outside to pee and then went to bed. 

When I go to bed though, I have to be careful. Buddy, my other dog, and Ralphie, the subject of this particular rant, love shiny things like my diamond ring and earrings. So before I fell asleep, I slipped my jewelry off and put it on my dressing table, far out of reach from any puppy eyes or mouths.

Or so I thought. 

Around 6 p.m., I woke up to the most distressing sounds I have heard in a while. A sound that could only be described as part gagging and part barfing up a lung awaited me as I struggled out of sleep. What was going on? I did a puppy check. Buddy, being the wonderful and lazy soul that he is, was contentedly laying on his side in the middle of my bed. 1 puppy safe. Ralphie was the source of the noise. 

Obviously, he had put something in his mouth that he shouldn't have. I picked him up and tried to open his mouth, but he wasn't having any of that. He jumped out of my arms and stood on the floor trying to work out whatever it was in his mouth. Since he was still breathing, I decided to let him try. I looked around the room to see what on earth could possibly be in his tiny chomper. Diamond ring - check. Necklace - check. Earring....only 1. 

Let me tell you a bit about my jewelry collection. It's pretty non-existent. Especially the more expensive stuff. My mother and sister, thanks to their husbands, have lots of nice jewelry pieces. I, the single one, am still working on my collection. And not very diligently at that. I like books and clothing instead. The particular earring that Ralphie decided to sample were my favorite pair of Pandora earrings - adorable little white flowers that go with anything. Now one was gone. 

At first I thought Ralphie had swallowed it, which really freaked me out since that meant, in order to get the earring back, poop sifting might be in my future. I turned my attention back to my pup to see how things were going. Pretty well, on one hand, because the barfing a lung sound had stopped. But the gagging was still a major problem.

In one of my attempts to get Ralphie to open up, I saw a shiny piece of metal stuck in his upper back teeth. My earring!! So, redoubling my efforts to get that mouth open, I finally dislodged the metal and Ralphie coughed it out. It was not my earring, but the back clasp. I found the actual earring part about 5 feet away on the floor, looking much worse for wear. Here is a before and after picture. 

 So, after many lectures to Ralphie about the danger of swallowing Mama's favorite earrings and to Buddy about watching his younger brother to keep him from doing stupid stuff again, I decided to go get another pair. And have a little fun of my own.

So they weren't really stress relief that day, but I probably will still keep them around. I think... 

AML

5 Things I Learned About Selling Your 1st House

The Lord is good to everyone who trusts in him,
So it is best for us to wait in patience - to wait for him to save us -
And it is best to learn this patience in our youth. Lamentations 3:25-27

85 days. Wow...

It was 85 days ago that I was crazy enough to put my house on the market. 86 days ago, I decided to start what my mom would call a new adventure.

I hate adventures. I have learned in my life that they are just code for something I don't really want to do.

Working for a professional theatre company, moving to a new city, having my cranky grandfather live three miles away from my house, hunting for a teaching job, having bats in my home...all of these experiences have been labeled as an adventure by my mother. (She also calls them opportunities and learning experiences - two other terms I have extremely wary of.)

ALL of these experiences were horrible. I hate adventures.

So when my mom called selling my house an adventure, I knew I was in trouble.

But, as someone who has directed numerous musicals with a cast and crew made up entirely of teenagers, I knew I could handle massive stress and chaos. I am tough. I can do this.

I think...

My mom was right about one thing, though. This has been a huge learning experience. A Texas sized learning experience. So I am going to share some of the wonderful lessons I have learned thus far in my first home selling opportunity.

Lesson #1: When selling your first home, you will have friends sell their houses much faster than you. And you will hate those friends. 

Selling a house takes FOREVER. At least my house does. But that's just me. Everyone else seems to sell their house effortlessly and without trouble. One of my friends was able to sell their house in 24 hours. And I had to be happy for them!! That was the worst part. I had to smile at their happy news, help them move, AND admire their new house as they started making improvements.

One of my friends actually had the audacity to sell their house within three days and had the Holy Grail of House Selling Experiences. They had a bidding war. There were 6 offers. They got significantly higher than asking price. And I had to hear about it. I had to smile, grit my teeth and congratulate them, help them move, and admire their new location.

Idiots.

I am 85 days out and it's a Friday night with no scheduled Saturday showings.

Lesson #2: You will have to move out every possession that you enjoy - everything that makes your house fun to live in - to a storage unit. 

All my books - storage unit. Almost all my clothes - storage unit. All the pictures I love - storage unit. Dogs - not the storage unit. They need to stay so they can pee and poo on the floor five minutes before I have a potential buyer show up.

Don't let them keep anything fun - that's the realtor's credo. The house has to look generic and boring.

Lesson #3: Common items that human beings use on a regular basis are now objects of shame and humiliation that must be hidden from all potential buyer's eye at all costs. 

You can't leave your tooth brush out for buyers to see. That would be catastrophic. They can't find out you actually use a comb and towel every morning - put those shameful objects of hygiene out of sight immediately.

The cereal bowl in the sink - nope, can't happen. No one can suspect that you actually EAT in your own HOUSE! The horror!

Then you have another problem because you develop places like this:

This is one of my many stashes of stuff. When you don't know what to do with something and you have a buyer coming in 10 minutes, you end up with hidden places like these. I have about 6 right now. I can't find anything.

Lesson #4: You discover problems with your house you didn't even know existed. 

Did you know my galley kitchen is not accessible to someone in a wheelchair? I never knew this before - had never really even thought about it before. But now I know - because a potential buyer pointed it out to me.

My bedrooms are too small. The carpet is awful (of course, this one I knew. I can't even try to disguise how bad my bedroom carpets look. Lord knows the last time they were replaced.) The stairs to my basement are too steep. There is a stain in my basement that looks like there was a fire. My kitchen appliances are out of date. One of my light switches is upside down. I have no room for additions of any sort. And the list goes on and on and on.

And you will find out about all of them. Every. Single. One. And if it's not your potential buyer, it's your realtor.

Of course, I must say, my realtor is fantastic. Tammy knows exactly how to sell a house. She was the one who sold all my friend's houses in hours. And she apologizes every time she gives me a list of things to fix. It's her job and I totally get that. But when she tells me I have to:
1) Scrape and touch up the paint on the entire exterior of the house
2) Fix the crack in my spare room
3) Pull all my weeds
4) Mow and trim my lawn
5) Get my garage door lock replaced
6) Call the energy company because one of the realtors who showed the house smelled gas
7) Clean the link by my dryer because it's a fire hazard and
8) Clean my entire house top to bottom because the open house is on Sunday

let's just say it gets a little tough to take.

Lesson #5: Smells in your house take on a whole new meaning and level of panic.

Not that I am a smelly person myself (or at least I hope not - if I smell, let me know), but in my single existence, I have become immune to some of the smells a buyer would usually notice. Yeah, my dogs smell a little, but that's what they do. I don't smell it. I forgot to take out the garbage and now the garbage can has a little odor, what's the big deal. My dogs found a new, secret place to take a dump - I will find and clean it eventually. My kitchen smells like gas a tiny bit, but I don't notice and am still alive. So what's wrong with that?

A lot, my realtor told me. No one wants to buy a smelly house. It's a huge turn off. And again, I get that. So I get a couple of those Glade plug in things in Apple Cinnamon, like Tammy told me too, and try to keep the place smelling fresh.

It's a lot harder than I thought! I had to replace my gas line to the stove because it wasn't up to code and you could smell gas. My dogs took on new dimensions of smelliness. Musty towels, putrid dishcloths, stinky garbage cans - the smells where everywhere, like Martian invaders!!! I started smelling weird parts of my house like the A/C vents and my couch cushions, trying desperately to find the evil, hidden smells while feeling like a complete idiot.

When Tammy told me people said the house smelled nice during our open house, I felt like I had won the lottery. I was proud of my house and it's lack of odor! Success!!

But I have learned a huge number of lessons. The major one is that I never, ever want to sell a house again. It isn't fun. But I have to have patience and trust in the Lord. I am not going to sell my house - he will send the perfect buyer to me in his own time. And then the wonderful day will come when I will get to move in a new house with my wonderful parents and...

get a brand new list of things I need to fix. And find out what that smell is.

AML