Surely the house will sell NOW.

Posted on August 18, 2009 by Margaret

When a house goes on the market, it’s common for the owners to sign a 90 day contract with their realtor, and that’s what we did. Once the “For Sale” sign went up, I methodically moved down a to-do list:

clean the oven
pack the 182 photo albums
organize the crawl space and label those boxes
match up the sheets and pillowcases we want to save
box up our hundreds of children’s books.

There were 86 items on my list, including miscellaneous repair projects, with which I needed help.

Ninety days passed. Then 120… and 150. I was up to #54 on the list but had slowed my efforts considerably, having lost any sense of urgency. Although many people came through our front door accompanied by realtors, nobody was buying. “Your house is quite old,” our realtor observed, “and that’s bothering people. You’ll need to fix it up in some significant ways.”

A month later we had hired a basement sealing company to put in a new system, making our musty cellar dry. We’d destroyed wooden shelves throughout the basement, because we were told they were moldy.

We tore down a wall that divided two small bedrooms, making one large one. (This was our realtor’s idea: “Most people want four bedrooms. Five can be a study or guest room. Six is too many.”) We painted the upstairs bedrooms and washed our 52 windows (each with a storm window) and spiffed up the gardens, planting new flowers.

We de-cluttered. Knick-knacks disappeared, and table cloths were put away in favor of polished wood surfaces. We did such a good job at this that one realtor said, “Oh, I see you’ve already moved out.”

We put new carpet in all the bedrooms and replaced an old toilet with a new stylish one. In a different bathroom we yanked out the cabinet base, sink and countertop, replacing them with new ones. In all the bathrooms we had the grout scoured and dyed, removing all stains.

Our 100-year-old farm house looked better than it had in decades, and we were sure it would sell NOW. After all, the entire country was still on the real estate ride of quick sales.

Then Mom got sick. They told us it was lymphoma, but she wanted to fight it, even at 92. Life picked up speed as we escorted her to doctor’s appointments and daily radiation treatments. And then winter came to Chicago.

Our realtor’s counsel was, “If you take it off the market for a few weeks, when it comes back on, it’ll be a new listing that’ll draw fresh attention.” She, too, was frustrated when the house refused to sell.

House hunting traffic had thinned anyway, so we took her advice and terminated our listing. It would be a relief not to clean like a maniac every time a potential buyer came. Our high school girls breathed a sign of contentment. “So the house isn’t for sale anymore?”

“Not right now.” And that was that.

Life in a Kitchen Aid mixing bowl

Posted on August 11, 2009 by Margaret

Have you ever caught your fingers in the whirling beaters of a mixing bowl? Doing it once insures you’ll never repeat it. I can testify to the experience: scrambled, twisted, excruciating.

Our house had been on the market for many months, and the ticking of every clock was like the unrelenting wap-wap-wap of mixing bowl beaters… with us in the bowl, scrambling. What would we do if the house never sold? Would we lose it to foreclosure? Excruciating.

Financially, I knew it would help if I went to work. Looking at want ads, I marked the newspaper with highlighters, but every job had at least one requirement I couldn’t meet. What does a homemaker do after being out of the work force for 35 years while raising her family?

My mind whirled as the beaters twisted me. How ‘bout this? Or that? Or something else? I looked in one direction and then another, here, there, back and forth, spinning fruitlessly, unable to grab onto anything.

Finally I decided to do what I should have done in the beginning. I asked God. I’m not sure why it took so much spin-time before approaching him, although it was difficult to look up when life was beating on me. All I could see from the bowl was chaos.

But God knew all along he had a plan. Never mind that he made us wait a little longer before he showed it to us. Wap-wap-wap.

I have a friend who loves the elderly. Jan works in a nursing home and is in charge of many residents, often befriending the spouses of those in her care, the ones who come visiting.

One day “out of the blue” she called me. “Would you like to become a companion for a delightful 83 year old lady, in her home, several days a week? She’ll pay double minimum wage.”

Within a week I was sitting in Bettye’s immaculate living room, hearing her make that same offer. And the job description? All the things I’d been doing as a stay-at-home mom for 35 years. It was a perfect match.

The beater stopped spinning, and God lifted me out of the mixing bowl. Bettye and I worked together in flawless synchrony until our family moved away just recently.

I’ve learned that God can be trusted and ought to be consulted well before life twirls out of control. He always has a good plan, and it’s always an original. The hard part is waiting with patience until he’s ready to reveal what it is. But when he does, the time will be exactly right.

Reality sometimes bites our kids.

Posted on August 7, 2009 by Margaret

We gathered the kids around the dining room table. “You all know how tight the money’s been around here,” Nate started. “We’ve tried to cut back every way we could. Some of you have had to drop out of college. All of you have jobs. We don’t go on vacations or buy new cars anymore. But this stuff hasn’t been enough.

There is one thing, though, that we could do…” he faltered… “that would help us alot… that we’re going to have to do.” He paused. “We need to sell our house.”

After a hush during which I was sure I heard the roll of thunder, Birgitta, 13, responded with horror on her face.

“You mean MOVE?!”

My personal tears anticipating this moment had been shed days before, during prayer times for the kids looking at us now. My hope had been to remain tearless at that moment and speak light into the storm cloud forming.

“Maybe we’ll move to the country,” I chirped in a voice too high to be mine. “Weezi, you might get your own horse!” Our 15 year old looked at me through eyes full of tears, pursing her lips to hold back a sob… and words.

Nelson, 31, having moved out long ago, pulled toward optimism by pointing out how the four brothers could use country acreage to store rattle-trap cars and non-functioning go-carts. Although we appreciated his try, our main focus was the younger kids, and they were not doing well.

Getting through our half-hour meeting was like trying to swallow a pill that refused to go down. Reality sometimes bites, and it was biting our children. Although we’d been tempted to sugar-coat the news, we thought it better to let them have the whole truth, bitter that it was.

Five of our seven children had known no other home. The oldest two had only a handful of early memories of our prior house. As we watched their facial expressions define different inner struggles, it felt like we were yanking baby bunnies from the safety and familiarity of their snug burrow.

“Do we absolutely have to move? Who will buy our house? When will we have to leave? Will we take the animals? Will I have my own room?”

Our only accurate answer was, “We don’t know.”

The contract was formalized, and a FOR SALE sign went up in the yard. Gradually, over weeks and eventually months, resistance melted. Our address didn’t change. Other than occasional visitors marching through the rooms with clipboards, family life continued on.

Little did we know that by the time a serious buyer with a healthy checkbook would finally surface four years later, most of us would have come to believe the house would never sell, and we would never move.