Heather MIA

Sorry I've been missing or otherwise sporadic in my posting. We've been working excessively hard to get the house on the market. I'm happy to say that today is the day, and we are officially listed.

Now, I've never sold a house before. My parents have, but I've never been involved in the transaction itself until now. I bought a house once...seven years ago, and now I'm trying to sell it. We got the house freshly painted, inside and out. We removed several pieces of furniture, lots of pictures from the walls, and quite a bit of stuff from surfaces, so it wouldn't look cluttered. We finally got around to getting a bedskirt for our bed. We finished the staining and poly-urethaning of the French doors that we put in nearly a year ago. The windows and curtains all got washed and preaned. We put $200 worth of mulch and flowers in the front yard for that all-too-important curb appeal. I have to say, after all this work, the house looks good enough that even I might buy it.

Then we found a realtor and together we based the list price on comparable house sales in the past six months, and went up a little bit. The average selling time for houses in our area in 23 days, so I figured we'd put it on the market, have a few people take a look at it this weekend, and start the negotiating process in the next few weeks. That's how I thought things would go.

I was completely off base.

Within an hour of listing the house, we have three offers in hand. I am completely floored. There are a couple of things this can mean:

• There is a shortage of quality houses on the market right now.


• We listed it way too cheap.


• Our house just rocks, and all that work on the house has paid off.

While I would love to believe it's option three, more likely, it's option 2, and we just didn't do a good enough job of predicting how much to list the property at. And now we have a multiple offer situation which could be really good, or everyone could back out and we end up waiting for the next thing to come through.

Who knew we'd have so much activity and interest in the first day? I haven't even had a chance to bake cookies and put on some light jazz for the house to show great. That was my plan for the weekend, and we may not even get there with the house still open for business.