Just plain tired

[textualdeviance]

The past several days of my life, in bullet form:



*Thanks very much to some needed help, the giant hole in the family room ceiling (from the leaking pipe/scary mold from hell problem) is now patched and is awaiting painting. Other things were also achieved this weekend thanks to said help, including replacing the fence post caps (some of which were missing, thanks mostly to storms.)

*The house still looks like a disaster, but it's really not half bad. It's just full to the gills with boxes, plus miscellaneous (To Be Sorted Later) stuff on every available surface. Progress has definitely been made, though. Only a few little things left to box up for the fragile stuff; the dining room is finally fully packed. Which leaves only M's office and the garage, both of which are in progress. My Willow and associated stuff is in my car, waiting to be safely tucked away in the villa tomorrow.

*The pod loaders will be here Wednesday, and the thing itself will be picked up a week from Monday. The end (of this stage, at least) is near!

*K has volunteered to take a lot of the big give-away stuff off of our hands (yay!) and also to help add a few plants to the front yard. I'm not entirely sure we're actually going to have a garage sale if the big stuff gets mostly gone. I may just call Goodwill to come pick it up, and whatever they don't take can be removed by Got Junk or something. Much as I'd like the extra cash a garage sale might bring in, I'm not sure it'd be enough to really make it worth the effort. Especially considering that the weekend we were planning to do it happens to be a holiday. Oops.

*The estimate for the carpet replacement was much lower than we'd budgeted for, and the above helpers have volunteered to help with the bathroom flooring. Yay!

*We're taking a bit of downtime tomorrow afternoon to go see Star Trek with K. Our entertainment of late has been almost entirely limited to TV, so it'll be good to be in a real theater for once.




*I just discovered tonight that my agency has been posting ads for jobs for which I'm qualified, and they haven't contacted me on them. The only thing I can think is that they had someone already lined up for those gigs, and only placed the ads as a formality. It's been a month since I heard from them last, and I'm really quite irritated that I haven't heard more. I sent mail to my recruiter letting her know I'm still alive. Maybe they just forgot me. Meh. In some ways, it's been good to have the extra time for the uprooting project, but if I'm still sitting around in July doing nothing except waiting for the house to sell, I'm going to go bonkers.

*I just now realized Mother's Day is tomorrow (today?) I've been ignoring the reminders because of the whole personal not a mom issue stuff that I plum forgot. Sorry, mom! I'll make it up to you!

*I've been doing caffeine lately to try to up my energy level enough to get through this, and it's starting to take its toll on me. Detoxing (when I finally get the time to do that) is going to be a bitch. Bleh.

*I'm really coming to the end of what I can do on the house right now. I'm just mentally and physically exhausted with all the packing and sorting and decision-making and heavy box toting and villa-feathering/maintaining of the last few weeks. I honestly had no idea how daunting this task really would be. The days of throwing everything I own in the back of someone's truck and moving in a weekend are way, way gone. Fortunately, I AM close to the end of this stage. Once everything's packed up and gone, all the rest of the house-related stuff (aside from decision-making) is going to be in the hands of pros and M and assorted folks we con into helping with some of the spiffing.

*It's downright criminal exactly how expensive it is to sell a house. All those lies they tell you about how a house is an investment? Well, sure. But only if you put a chunk of money down, stay there a long time, spend only the bare minimum necessary for upkeep and it appreciates more than the rate of interest you're paying. Real estate agents are thieves. THIEVES. Who the hell needs 4%+ of the sales price just to generate an MLS number and host an open house or two? That's disgusting. And there's no way around it, either. FSBOs don't get nearly the same attention from buyers because THEIR agents won't look at them. Ugh. It's a racket. String 'em all up on RICO charges, dammit!

*Today's crazy house hacking projects ran late enough that I missed harassing mrdorbin and southplains. :( Dangit.


All that said, even though this project is crazy and exhausting and completely consuming my life right now, I'm still glad we're doing it. Going back to school was a good way to get out of some of the personal ruts I was in, and that helped a lot, but we've also been in a long-term overall life stage rut, too, and part of that has been where we were living. It's time to move on, and the process, while uncomfortable, is a good mental and practical roto-rootering. It'll be interesting to see how our life gets redefined with a new place when that comes.

Assuming, of course, that we have enough money left over at the end of this insanity to afford something. Sigh...

Comments

[falcongirl.livejournal.com]

I'm also dreading the thought of moving. I tend to become entrenched in my houses, and moving requires purging.. and I loathe both packing and unpacking.

The 4% is high. Did you agent shop? Also, you might want to FSBO on CList for a bit - that way, it doesn't rack up time on the market and you can gauge interest. Just make sure there are a shit-ton of pictures. The market's different here, but lately a LOT of houses have been selling privately because nobody trusts agents. They're going directly through the banks for their loans.

[textualdeviance.livejournal.com]

I've poked around and seen agents who charge as much as 5%, which is absolutely ridiculous. I think we're going to end up going with Redfin, though, which has a flat fee which is a lot better (for our price range, at least.)

But then we still have to pay the 3% to the buyer's agent, and about 2% in closing costs. And we'll probably hire stagers, too. All in all, we're looking at losing probably about a third of our potential equity just to sell it. Which is horrible.