Mr. Real Estate Agent Broke My Heart

If you follow my personal blog you are no doubt sick of hearing me talk about my HOUSE and how it is SMALL and my various CRACKPOT IDEAS for how to extricate ourselves from this situation. Most people, because they are NORMAL, would work with the house they have, be thankful and shut up about it on their personal websites. But not me! Oh no, I prefer to whine (eloquently, of course) about the near-impossibility of getting my kids to sleep in the same room and woe is us and maybe we can sell it now, rent a bigger house for a year and THEN find our Perfect House, once Phillip is done with grad school. Oh yeah, did I mention grad school? And how people must be crazy to think about selling one's house in a difficult market when they are shelling out tuition money every quarter? RIGHT.

But whatever. I am the master of my own destiny! So this morning a very nice man named Mr. Real Estate Agent dropped by my house to do a little walk through and give me the low down on Selling A House. Basically, Phillip and I were trying to figure out if we could at least break even on the sale of our house and whether there were acceptable rentals in our price range. Mr. Real Estate Agent was an absolute doll: juggling satsumas, drinking pretend tea and totally cool with having a conversation while two toddlers jumped up and down on my bed. I loved Mr. Real Estate Agent. Looking for an agent in the Seattle area? I'VE GOT YOUR MAN.

So then we started talking numbers. This was unfortunate for Mr. Real Estate Agent, as I am numbers stupid (no really, you will read the extent of this stupidity in an upcoming paragraph) but I did my best to answer his questions. He talked about taxes and commissions and something else I can't remember. He wrote all sorts of large scary numbers on the back of the stat sheet he'd printed out about my house, and then slid it in front of me. It turned out that if we sold our house, at the price Mr. Real Estate Agent recommended, we would have (gasp) money left over.

CALLOO! CALLAY! This was TERRIBLY exciting to me. Not only would we break even, we would have EXTRA! I immediately launched into a discussion of WHEN to put the house on the market and informed him that we would definitely hire him as our agent and I would be talking my husband into selling sooner rather than later. My love for Mr. Real Estate Agent was further cemented when he said very kind things about the state of my house, told me I wouldn't have to get rid of all the toys, that we would work around nap times for showings and no, he thinks the red paint in the little bathroom is FABULOUS!

When Phillip came home I excitedly showed him the sheet of numbers and started talking about what we'd have to put in storage and how if he didn't go along with my timeline I might leave him for Mr. Real Estate Agent. Phillip, though, wasn't listening to anything I was saying. He was looking at the numbers and shaking his head. "Maggie," he said slowly, "we'd still have to make up for our down payment. The amount he shows leftover from the sale is only two thirds of our down payment."

Someone felt more than a little foolish.

So it looks like we won't be moving this year. We will most likely move the following year, even if we only get two thirds of our down payment back in the sale. I mean, we can't stay here forever. But we can certainly stay one more year. I'm not as disappointed as I thought I might be. Phillip is pretty bummed, but I'm hanging out more in the Well, At Least We Know camp. Right? Now I know what we have to do. I can focus on figuring out what to do if and when Molly is too big for the pack 'n play in our bedroom, but can't sleep in her crib because Jack is busy un-napping. I can think about toy storage and toy purging. I can figure out whether I'm going to have to buy one of those sold-on-TV vacuum storage packs for all the baby clothes, or if I should just dump them all in a Goodwill parking lot.

In the meantime I'm thankful we HAVE our house. It's on the smaller side and completely child-unfriendly, but it's pretty and close to everything I love and I'm going to have to stick it out another year with my beautiful kitchen? BOO HOO! Now to figure out how to stop refreshing Redfin every morning...

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