LOVE it! (my dog, who died last fall, was named Oliver. He was the best dog I've ever known, so I'm glad he had a great name, but after I had kids I was always a little sad I used it on a dog and didn't save it)

Yay! That IS a relief! I made the mistake of looking back through our inspection report from when we bought this house, and it terrified me. who knew so many things could be wrong with a house that looked perfectly okay?! Oh no! One of those someday you'll look back and laugh things I suppose, but not what you want right now!

Ugh! So rude! I hate when there's no card...I run all over the house looking for any tiny sign that something's different to confirm that someone was here. Like today...no card, but they left our front door unlocked. :glare: Nothing much to report here. We had another showing this morning, both here and the other house. Our agent reports that the people who looked the other day liked the other house better AND that one person went to look at the other house and didn't even want to see ours. It's the same house! If the new windows and roof were what people were mentioning, I could understand, but every single time it's that stupid granite. It's making me really hate granite and everything associated with it. We're supposed to be putting in the contingent offer on the foreclosure we love today, but I haven't heard from our agent. I suspect this means she has bad news of some sort or another. She doesn't like to give people bad news, I'm starting to gather.

thanks! And my house is $2000 cheaper right now, so...there's your granite! If I were the buyer the biggest advantage I'd see in their house is the newer windows and roof, really. But it's not like there's anything WRONG with ours; the roof is just 9 years old.

Showing today! both houses, of course. But, hey--if someone buys the other one, at least we don't have to compete with it anymore. But maybe big screen porch and deck will trump granite for these buyers :D

I'd read up more about LDL and the "good" and "bad" LDL. My understanding is that a regular screen doesn't distinguish between the two, but there are two different kinds; one is fine, the other not. A regular screen doesn't actually measure your LDL directly; it uses a formula to derive it. And I've also heard that that formula is inaccurate if you have very low triglycerides. Last time I had my cholesterol checked, my LDL was borderline high, but my triglycerides were very low and all my ratios looked great. But I start sounding dumb very fast when I talk about something with so many numbers! Here: http://www.marksdailyapple.com/cholesterol/#axzz1p9dU3B8U

We seem to have a lot going on. I always prefer that to nothing going on. the other house is on the market at 157, and we just dropped ours to 155. Dh and the kids are going to CA without me in a few weeks, so I can stay here and take care of house stuff (and not have to board all the animals, which would cost a fortune). I mentioned to my agent today that I would have time to paint the kitchen cabinets while they were gone, and she offered to come and help me! This is why we love her. Well, one of the reasons. so we'll see what the price drop/competition does. I've seen pictures of the other house now, and I feel better. It definitely has some nice things about it, but I think ours has advantages, too. Our porch/deck is much nicer (we have a big screen porch and huge lower deck that we added a few years ago; they have a small deck with no yard access), for example. I suspect that our house will appeal more to people with young families and theirs to older people/people with no kids. But we'll see. One advantage of having the same agent is that I imagine we'll hear the feedback when people compare the two. How's everyone else doing?

it would! Hickory Flat area. Are you looking to buy? If you are, I'll be sorry I just told you you can get a house with granite right down the street for about the same price ;) Though I should mention that WE have a lovely screen porch and big deck, and they don't

Thanks, guys....it's pretty much the worst case scenario. I mean...if they were in such a hurry to sell that they wanted to WAY underprice it, they'd sell it fast and be out of our way, and people would figure it was just a fluke. I'm worried that as it is, it could stretch out for months with us waiting for them to sell so that people will even look at our house. And to top it off, our agent confirmed (or confirmed that the other sellers told her) that the foreclosure that sold recently is being flipped, and the guy might have it on the market in less than a month, too. And I'm sure that will be more granite to wow people. This is a really small subdivision....maybe 100 houses or so....it's pretty much unheard of for there to be 3 houses on the market at the same time in here. She wants us to put in an offer with a contingency on the foreclosure we really, really love. The reasoning is that it doesn't hurt to try, and that if we KNOW we can get something that much under our budget, we can be more flexible on price here. We're going back to look at it again on Friday with our agent and her contractor husband--so he can give us an idea of how much money we might need to put into it. We know it has a bad leak in the sunroom and needs a couple of new windows there. And the power and water are cut off; the HVAC looks really old, so I'd just go in assuming that would need to be replaced. But it's such a big, lovely house! We'll see.

Well, not good news. Our agent came by after meeting with other people. Their bottom line price is the same as ours, but their house is much more updated: granite countertops, hardwood floors, all new windows, new roof, etc. And pretty much the same exact layout and square footage. Sigh. They mostly just care about selling fast.

yes, the poop. also something to worry about when you go out of town. When we had ours, our house sitter didn't mind tacking taking care of chickens onto the other animals (and they require about the same amount of care as cats in that respect; i.e. if it's a weekend trip they're probably fine on their own...longer trips you can have someone over every 2-3 days to check on them). I think the pros outweigh the cons, though!

It really is amazing how often you hear, "buyers don't have any imagination!" Really--none of them?! It's so hard to believe that if we had left our dining room set up as an office/music room, buyers would have walked through the house completely confused, "but, I don't understand? Where's the dining room?!" And, yet, you do see that kind of thing on House Hunters, et. al. all the time....people saying stuff like, "ooh--I really hate this color!" as if they've never heard of paint before.

The more I think about it, I'm wondering if maybe she thought it was actually a stuffed (as in taxidermy) dog. It does look really realistic, and if she didn't come in the room, she didn't get the best look at it. :lol:

Hope it does the trick! Finally heard back about the open house. Only two neighbors showed up. And one of them told the agent she was "so unsettled" by this plaster dog statue we have that she couldn't go in the room. Umm....guess I'll move him? He was my late grandmother's; we just got him a few months ago--I asked for him when they were going through her stuff because he sat outside her apartment and the kids always loved him, and I wanted something that would help them remember her.....so anyway, I don't want to shove him in the basement or anything. Really, I probably shouldn't worry about it; he's just a life size lab statue; he's not really at all unsettling to the average person, I'm pretty sure. In other news, my agent e-mailed this morning to tell me she's meeting with someone else in our neighborhood to talk about selling THEIR house. Eek! competition! I feel sort of cheated on, although I know I shouldn't. I think they have pretty much the exact same house (well, floor plan anyway) as us. How will people decide?!

I'm glad to see that my girly boy dog, Gable, is not alone! Actually, I have a terrible secret to tell about Gable, that you can never tell him I told you. When we first got him, at the shelter, when he was about 9 months old (and already neutered) we looked and...had a hard time being sure he was really a boy. Poor Gable. Good thing he's neutered so it doesn't matter anyway.

I had really hoped that we were selling the right kind of house for this market...i.e. a cheap one--to appeal to first time homebuyers who want to get in now while prices are low and interest rates are great (and the rental market is terrible for renters). But so far the first time home buyers aren't exactly flocking here. I looked again at the giant subdivision nearby....with the similarly sized houses but on tiny little lots...but this time at the ones that actually sold recently instead of what's for sale right now. It's TERRIBLE....houses that people paid $180,000 for a few years ago are going for $120,000 now! It makes me really glad, though, that I didn't buy something like that as new construction a few years ago (built in 2003-4, it looks like). I'm guessing it's almost all young families--people who bought there thinking they'd stay a few years and then trade up, only now they're stuck. Anyway, I can't compete with those. We'll just have to wait on someone who's willing and able to pay a little more to get the land and privacy.

Mariann, I think I read your whole, long house-selling thread before we listed ours (and somehow found the courage to list ours anyway!). It's always bittersweet when someone joins the commiseration thread: "welcome! ....and sorry you're here." :D I'm not sure which is more maddening...my hardly any showings situation or your lots of showings but no offers situation. STILL no word from my agent about yesterday. She's usually pretty good about giving us feedback, so I'm guessing she's having trouble getting in touch with the agent who did the open house. Either that or there's nothing to tell. Or, you know, she's so busy handling the six offers that came in that she hasn't had a spare second to call me...I can dream, right? :lol: I found an approved short sale for sale the other day that I'm really intrigued by. The neighborhood is a little more...swim/tennis-y than I prefer, but the location is PERFECT--we could walk to a lot of restaurants and the place where the kids take classes and do plays. VERY close to friends (like a 4 minute drive) and a perfectly decent commute for DH. And it's CHEAP. I'm sure it needs work, though. And it's stucco, which could be no big deal or a big problem; we'd have to have a very good inspector and see what turns up. There's one other house--a foreclosure--that we really love, too. I'm trying so hard not to fall in love with houses I can't make offers on, but it's impossible!

Yay--congratulations!!! Let us know how everything goes with the inspection. and pass some of that luck over this way....my birthday's coming up in a few weeks :)

Too far out to be the suburbs, but people still commute to the city, basically--as I understand it. We're about an hour from Atlanta. DH doesn't make that commute, since he teaches in our school district, but I wonder if more people were willing to live out here and drive to the city back when gas was half the price. I've never had an open house before, but, yeah, I was surprised she didn't stick around. Of course, I don't know anything about this agent. If it were ours, I'm sure she would have. Maybe no one came and this agent couldn't face disappointing us? Who knows?

Ooh--fingers crossed for you! Sounds promising. Yes...a bidding war...wouldn't that be lovely? Let's see...which above asking price offer should we accept? :lol: I have no idea how the open house went! It's driving me crazy (I feel like I say that about a lot of stuff associated with this house selling thing). Our agent is out of town this weekend, so it was another agent doing it. I left about 15 minutes before it was supposed to start, and she hadn't shown up yet. Then I got back about 10 minutes before it was supposed to end, and she was already gone! I thought for a little while that she hadn't shown up at all, but then we noticed that one door was locked that we had left unlocked. And I texted my agent, and she confirmed that she'd definitely been there because the lockbox had been used. But we haven't heard anything. I'm thinking the fact that she left early is a bad sign (and annoying, since I wanted to hear from her right then about what traffic we'd gotten, and that's why I made a point of getting back a few minutes early...to make sure we'd catch her). Sigh. I just don't know that there are that many buyers in this area right now. Exurbia and high gas prices are a bad combination.

Aw, she sounds great! And fingers crossed that she's right and you're pleasantly surprised by how much your get for your house! When our agent saw our chickens and their set-up (which, admittedly, was a lot more....utilitarian than pretty), she said, "and all this will be gone, right?" We were like, "umm...yes?" Fortunately, I have a friend nearby who was looking to expand her flock, and she has them now. I hear they're settling in well. Sniff, sniff. But around here I'm pretty sure said agent is right that most people think of chickens as dirty and weird instead of quirky and fun. Boo! Hoping the person who's RIGHT that your house is the best talks the other one into it soon! :) Another day with no showings. Yesterday I was feeling kind of weepy and emotional all day, and then last night the dog ripped some siding off our house trying to catch some animal only she could see (DH mostly got it fixed) and THEN my car wouldn't start. I had a total meltdown because DH was supposed to be gone all day today to a math tournament and it all seemed like way too much for me to deal with. But then his second attempt at jump starting worked and he was able to get out of going to the tournament, and I'm in much better spirits today. Open house tomorrow! I don't expect much to go on with that, really--we're pretty far out, so we don't get a lot of drive by traffic. Unless things pick up very, very soon (like tomorrow), I'm going to talk to our agent about lowering the price.

Sounds like a fun plan! Yeah, all that stuff adds up so fast! Our only really big expense has been the new carpet, but I don't even want to think about how much the new garage door opener here, just a couple more gallons of paint there added up to. Not to mention the hot water heater and two HVACs (separate units upstairs and down) that we've had to replace in the past 18 months that now someone else is going to get to enjoy for the next 20 years instead of us!

We're doing WWE 1 and 3 and WWS 1, and I don't find it to be too time consuming. As others have said, WWS is meant to be done mostly independently (and we've found that to be true) and WWE generally only takes a few minutes. I do WWE3 with DS8 while DS10 is doing WWS (and DS6 if off playing somewhere). Then when the older two are reading on their own, I do WWE1 with DS6.

:grouphug: I'm sorry, hana--that's terrible! :D The cats are actually being remarkably good so far. Occasional meowing, but nothing worse. We'll see how they hold up Sunday for the three hour open house, though! We're hoping to, but it depends where we wind up. One town we're looking at allows chickens; one doesn't. And then it depends on whether there's an HOA, too, of course. So chicken potential does make some houses more attractive to us, but it's not a deal breaker.

good luck! I hear you...I'm ready to drop our price, like, yesterday just to be done with it! Even though I feel like I'll be doing it to price myself competitively with houses with the same square footage but a quarter of the land, no basement, one less bedroom, etc. But then, I'm sure the people selling the houses we're looking at in our next town are thinking the same thing: "why on earth are people paying 10,000 more for a smaller house on a smaller lot, just because it's 10 years newer?!" And we'll be the beneficiaries on that end of things, so I guess it will all even out. Also took at a look at the sold prices of the very first houses we looked at, a couple of months ago, and I'm sort of pleasantly shocked at how low they went for. One house that we really loved (although it had some drawbacks) sold for $25,000 under the asking price (which had already been dropped over $50,000) AND $25,000 under our budget. So maybe we can drop what we think we need to get for this house a bit after all. Of course, our agent is out of town this weekend, so nothing to do but sit tight and try not to think about it too much until she gets back!