Our house has been on the market for 31 days. We’ve had 19 showings and two open houses.

Weary doesn’t begin to cover it.

But today we’ve received an offer. And there’s potential for a second offer.

We’re preparing to dance in the streets.

We’re entering the negotiating phase right now, which is a little wild. It’s hard to believe that literally thousands of dollars are being tossed back and forth as the offers and counter-offers fly. I try not to think about that.

Update: We settled on an offer last night and now it’s just pending inspection!

Our house went on the market yesterday. So if you know anyone who knows anyone who wants a beautiful starter home with amazing woodwork in a great neighborhood, check out our house.

We’re not actually leaving St. Paul, we’ve just out-grown our house. When we moved in it was just the two of us. Then we added a dog. Then I started working at home and needed an official home office. Then we added a second dog. And then we added the baby. While the dogs and working at home didn’t make us feel cramped, adding a kid to the mix definitely did. So even though we love our house and love the neighborhood and location, it’s time to find something bigger.

Continue reading Selling and Buying a Home →

Yesterday I watched the garbage man toss a lamp, a brass coatrack, a pile of curtain rods, three bulging garbage bags and my usual full trashcan. He never paused, he never considered, he just picked them up and threw them in the truck. And if that wasn’t final enough, the truck sat there for a few minutes while all my old crap was crushed.

Man, it feels good to clean out the house and get rid of all this junk. On Thursday the recycling man took away almost every magazine I’ve collected, my correspondence with the Yomega yo-yo corporation, a marked up early print out of my first novel and more useless junk that I’ve realized I don’t need to store in the basement anymore.

Yesterday a man came and bought our half-finished Mac aquarium. I’ve also seen my Star Wars toys and baseball cards carted off. I’ve also eBayed a ton of stuff that was taking up space in drawers and made a run to Goodwill that filled the entire back of our car. And, believe it or not, we carted off four brimming grocery bags full of books.

Now I’m just waiting for my several leads to snatch up my NASCAR cards, the Batman stuff, the beast (we dropped the price), and I’m still hoping for a lead on my pile of Billy Graham memorabilia. Perhaps the family fued over Billy’s grave will spurn somebody to see the value in my box o’ Billy.

We’ve been having quite a cold snap this September and I finally caved today and turned the heat on. It’s not actually that cold, it’s just cloudy and chilly outside, making it not so cozy indoors. I have guilt making Lexi toughen up and endure the cold, so I opted to turn the heat on. It was 64 in our living room when I turned it on.

This is the earliest we’ve ever turned the heat on. Last year it was October 24 (and a whopping 11 degrees colder in the house when I caved). It was October 5 in 2004 and September 29 in 2003.

For most of the summer I’ve been hiring a teen from the youth group to do my yard work. But this week he got a real job, or rather a few real jobs, and was too busy to do my yard. So I did it myself.

After hacking down the weeds that were trying to reclaim my driveway I took a break and noticed that my hand was shaking. Fifteen minutes of weedwhacking and my hand starts shaking. So either I’m a wuss and need to start doing more manual labor, or I need to hire more youth group kids.

Well, I finally broke down and turned on the heat. It was 55 degrees in our living room this morning and the dogs kept shivering. Last year we turned on the heat October 5 and the year before that it was September 29, so I’m really amazed we lasted this long.

But with natural gas prices expected to be 150% higher this year I’m not looking forward to paying for that heat. We’ve tried to better insulate our front door and we’ll be putting plastic on our living room window to try to minimize the heat loss. We’ll also be relying on candles, down blankets, the laptop, lap dogs, layers, slippers, baking and just about anything else to keep warm and minimize those triple digit heating bills.

Welcome back to Minnesota winters.

So last night we slept with the windows open for the first time in a long time. Once we shut the lights off and everything got quiet we heard and odd rapping sound. We listened to it for a few minutes before I finally got up and looked out the window. I couldn’t see anything below or to the right, but when I looked left I saw what looked like a telephone pole leaning up against the house.

Profanity ensued while I got dressed, grabbed a manly flashlight and went outside to inspect the damage. Turns out a strip of fascia had been ripped off the side of the house in a recent storm and about ten feet of it was hanging off the roof.

Continue reading Losing and Replacing Fascia →

Marketing guru Seth Godin points us to the history of the American lawn, something I’ve gone off on before. The green lawn is a recent invention, not popularized until the 1800s, and it wasn’t until the early 1900s that we had a decent grass seed.

Now Americans have become weekend warriors trying to keep the most immaculate lawn. Supposedly it’s a $17 billion industry (we spend $17 billion on “outdoor home improvements” every year, which sounds like more than grass, but the context implies lawn maintenance), which makes for quite the marketing story. It’s very akin to Godin’s new book, All Marketers Are Liars (he quickly admits they’re not liars, just storytellers, and as consumers we love a good story).