Selling the House – Chapter 2
We continue our flashback series from Spring 2008, when we were selling our house.
We gave a local FSBO circular our blurb, our digital photos, and our money, several hundred dollars of it, and waited for the calls to come in. We did not know how long we should have to wait.
Our sense of our house’s desirability was balanced and counter-balanced by several factors: the sluggish national housing market, deflated by a sub-prime mortgage crisis in its infancy, lowered our expectations. The inoculation of New England real estate to national trends buoyed them. Our small town was upper middle class and white collar. Located in the mountains without a great deal of buildable land, housing in was generally scarce and expensive, even in a down market. Our particular house was a 3 bedroom, 1 bath house, in a market flooded with large, 4-6 bedroom Victorians. The national wisdom was that the buyer should have the pick of the litter, but this logic didn’t work locally where the litter was small. If you were looking for a house in our desirable little village, and you wanted to “size up,” then you had choices and room to bargain. But if you were a retiree, a a divorcee, a recently widowed or empty nester, if you were someone whom life had given a few kicks and you needed a smaller place to heal and start over, there weren’t a lot of options available in our market.
We intended to show the house on Sundays only, but the first caller abrasively shoved our faces against reality. In a tearing hurry, she made it clear that she had to see the house that very morning or not at all. We spent a furious hour cleaning the home, and then Dawn rushed the children down the stairs to the library as our prospective buyercame up the front steps. She spent ten minutes spent politely scanning the rooms before telling us that our home was well-priced but required more work that she was prepared to spend money on.
By the time indignation released its choking grasp on my wit, she was already in her car. I called out the front door, “You think it’s bad now, wait till you read the disclosure statement!” but my esprit d’escalier barely tarnished the chrome on her retreating bumper.
So it went. Random calls followed by frenetic, house-beautiful drills. Scrub the toilet and tub, wipe the toothpaste scum off the mirror and the dried urine off the back of the toilet where the three-year-old boy’s target practice failed, vacuum the carpets and remove any garbage, throw hundreds of small plastic, wood, metal, and paper toys into their appropriate boxes. Hustle the children off to a friend’s house, a sunny playground, or an air-conditioned library. The grand tour with a new set of strangers, lasting ten to thirty minutes, honing my patter and learning in time what to say and, more importantly, what not to say.
DO point out the hand-crafted built-in bookcase. DO point out the newly installed, energy-efficient oil furnace. Do NOT point out the couch on which your wife gave birth to your only son, nor regale them with the details of that particular story. People might buy a house with a dripping faucet, some peeling paint, even a vague, romantic ghost haunting on a full moon, but they do not want your physical and emotional baggage upstaging their mental revision of your home.
More people came by. Young professional unmarried couples, a single mother who had sold her home and needed a place within a month, a recently divorced gentleman able to pay cash but who eventually chose not to. No offers. I was pleased by the steady stream, but disappointed that the fish would not bite. We had had only one nibble, a single, retired woman who appreciated the large windows and quiet neighborhood and who envisioned blissful Sunday mornings spent with canvas and oil paints. But on a third visit, after wandering the premises with “the practical friend”, someone in the home construction line, doubts began to bubble up through the dreamy impressions. She stood in our front room at sunset and turned off the lights. The afternoon windows failed to light up the living room to a suitable level of Impressionistic splendor, and the love light in her eyes extinguished.
I had come to appreciate the brevity and candor of our very first visitor. She had been brutally candid, and once the stinging had subsided, I was able to see how valuable her critique had been. And she had only taken ten minutes of our time.
The landscaping grew shabbier. It rained every afternoon for days and days, so that the lawn was never dry enough to mow, but I took advantage of a dry weekend morning to climb on the roof with a steel-bristled painter’s scraper to remove lichen from the roof tiles on the shady side of the house. It was a slow, sweaty, uncomfortable job that ended before it was completed when there were no more steel bristles left on the brush. But the day remained dry, so the next afternoon I was outside with the mower and sheers, building up another cleansing sweat. The children cavorted outside, and Dawn took advantage of their absence to clean the highly-trafficked stairwell that connected the kitchen to the garage and doubled as a pantry. The walls were greasy and the stairs perpetually grimy from the tracked in dirt.
After an hour, Rose came running to find me behind the shade garden under the back yard trees adding trimmed branches to the brush pile.
“Mama wants you!” she called.
I heaved a sigh, hoisted my creaking frame, and pushed my glasses back up the bridge of my nose with the gloved back of my wrist. Trundling around to the front of the house, I left the shears on the rock wall and walked in the basement man door. The walls were damp and dripping, and Dawn was at the top of the stairs with a bucket of sudsy water and rubber gloves on, and her voice had the timbre of someone trying not to panic. “There are … um … sparks coming out of the light switches down there.” At the same time I saw the smoke.
The plate at the bottom of the stairs had three switches: one switch for the stairwell, one for the basement/garage, and one switch that had never done anything the whole time we lived in the house. Except for now. It lit up like a sparkler on the 4th of July, occasionally ejecting a narrow flame like the forked tongue of asnake flicking in and out.
Dawn grabbed the fire extinguisher and sprayed the light switch plate, which didn’t help because the fire was behind the plate. Fortunately the breaker box was around the corner, so I shut off the circuit, grabbed the extinguisher from her, and walked to the other side of the wall with the light switch. This was in the garage and there was no sheet rock on this wall. The switch box was exposed, and I put the nozzle right on an access hole in the switch box. I dowsed the inside until it filled with a noxious mustard yellow powder. In twenty seconds the sparking and fire was gone, leaving an acrid, gritty, musky stench in the air the settled on our tongues like a bad hangover.
Fortunately, the metal switch box had contained the fire inside itself. The walls had not burned, nor even taken any smoke damage.
We vacuumed out the powder, and I rewired the box, replacing the aged, faulty switch that had never done a lick of work in its life and had not cared for the soapy bath Dawn had given it when her washing water had dripped down the walls and into its casing. The air was still redolent of burnt wiring insulation. Gritty yellow powder clung to the sweat on our faces and the saliva on our teeth. But when I flipped the new switch, the outdoor flood lights lit up the driveway.
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