Those old Houses

This has nothing to do with SAHD's so, if you are looking for that, move on.

We have, at long last, sold our old house. This was a long process, much longer than I had thought it would be at the time. A year ago, I was obsessively scanning the MLS listings literally morning and night, just in case something had been added in the time since I'd last looked. I fiddled with zip codes and price ranges, tweaked this and that, drove around neighborhoods looking for "For Sale by Owner" signs, and obsessed like mad over a house I never even had a chance to look at because it sold in like three days. We agonized over a couple of places that were almost right, and even made an offer on one (just this once I think it would be okay to breathe a prayer of thanks for crazy out of state siblings that don't belong to you). It would be early July before we found a truly suitable place, the end of July before it was ours. Long-time readers of these pages will know that the process of getting the place ready was a long one, and it was not until December we could move in. A month later began the job of getting the old house ready for sale, with new paint and carpet, clearing out the trash and detritus of the move, all that crap. A month later that was finally all done and we could go on the market. A month and a half later, we got a good offer (not without some other nibbles along the way), and a month and a half after that was last week. The process was a bit over a year from start to end.

I tell you what, that was a load off.

And on top of that, last week we closed a sale on an old house that had belonged to my grandfather. My family used it when working at our ranch near Tilden, Texas. Trish and I hung on to it for five years after Mom died, thinking we might be able to use it ourselves. In the end, we finally realized it would be better to put a cheap little hunting cabin on the ranch itself than to keep that house (in town, about 10 miles away from the land), and we put it up for sale as well. After many fits and starts, it went last week as well. We were there this past Sunday, clearing out the last little bits of stuff we wanted or needed to get rid of.

But now we are done with all that. Done. Finished. Kaput. And we can concentrate on polishing the one house we have left.