Our 1st Home Showing

Al and I have always known that we work better under pressure.  We proved it again when we had to about kill ourselves getting the house ready for it’s first showing.

It’s not that we haven’t been working, but we just hadn’t gotten it all pulled together.   We actually listed the house before it was ready, thinking here in this rural area with the bad housing market, buyers would be scarce. Well, I can tell you, we  got it pulled together very quickly  when we got “the call.”

On Monday night about 9 pm we were preparing to start watching season 3 of Dexter, when the phone rang.  I jumped up to get the phone and jokingly, said,  “it’s probably Lorraine”  (our Realtor)  Well it was!  There was another Realtor that wanted to bring someone by on Tuesday at noon.  NOON?  You’ve got to be kidding?    I asked if they could do it later in the day, but since it was getting late, we would know nothing until the next morning.  So we had to prepare for a showing at noon. 

This one phone call made me start to think.   We could be homeless in a month and have nowhere to go.  Are we ready for this next step in our lives? 
Are we sure we want to do this?  How will we manage with the cats?  How will we get rid of all this stuff?    Well of course those were only brief thoughts….I didn’t have time to contemplate them any further. 

Fortunately, I had a long nap Monday afternoon and wasn’t tired, but Al didn’t get much of a nap and was tired from not sleeping the night before. 

Let me tell you a brief story  about why Al didn’t get much sleep the night before. 

I’ve learned through the years that when Al is overly tired, he gets extremely grumpy.  When he gets like that everything offends him and he thinks I’m picking on him.  I try to ride it out until he gets rested up.  He came back from his trip to Tampa extremely tired.  He works really hard while he’s there so that he can get home sooner, (so that I can pick on him?)   Sunday night we had a little argument and Al  decided I needed to be “punished.”  

I know some men who punish their wives by beating them, or by leaving home or something like that.  Well how Al punishes me is …… he sleeps on the couch!

Okay, picture Karen in the middle of her  big old king sized bed stretched out all nice and comfortable, while Al (the punisher) is sleeping on the couch with no blanket or pillows!   I thought about covering him up and giving him a pillow but decided to let him suffer!  He had been being such a grouch, I was not very happy with him at that point!

Well despite Al being very tired, we did get the house ready for it’s first showing.  We were able to change the showing until 4 pm, so we had more time and we needed every bit of it. 

When they arrived at 4pm, we left the house, but stayed on the property.  Our property is large and hard to figure out exactly where the boundary lines are, so we told them if they wanted us to, we would be glad to show them around outside once they looked inside.   They were interested enough to want to know exactly where our property is and I took the male half of the couple on a tour on the golf cart.  He is an older man, maybe in his 70’s.  Al was wondering why someone that age would be looking for such a big property because it’s really a lot of work.  Anyway, they didn’t say much, about whether or not they liked the place, but did ask some questions.    After the tour, they stood outside and talked  to their Realtor at least 20 minutes.  We took that as a good sign.  The man told me that he had 2 properties up for sale, one on a lake and another in the country he was worried about selling.  I don’t know if that means he had to sell them before he bought anything else or not.

We hadn’t heard anything back from our Realtor last night, so I’ll send her an email this morning to see if she had heard from the other Realtor.