A Constructed Life

I just buried a small Christian in my backyard

This little guy, St. Joseph, who will supposedly help us sell our home. Apparently once he’s resting under several inches of dirt in our yard, our perfect buyer will appear and snatch our home off the market. In other words, we’ve become a little desperate.

I’ll admit that 7 weeks ago when the For Sale was first erected in our yard, I felt confident that we’d be packing boxes soon, because as the current homeowner – one who rebuilt this shack with her own two hands and then filled it with two small children – I am biased in my view of this place. But that’s not to say I wasn’t aware of its flaws when we started this process. There were two glaring issues with our home that we feared would bite us in the butts, and well…let’s just say there are teeth marks on our bottoms.

The first problem? Our house needed to be painted, badly. Joey and two friends painted it about 9 years ago, and we meant to repaint it last summer, but other things came up. So it hit the market looking weathered and potential buys didn’t love that.

Look at the peak at the top. All three of the peaks featured worn off paint and the south side of the home was covered in yellow paint peels.

The next monumental issue? The terrifying monster in our basement.
That’s our boiler – the thing that heats our house. It’s original to the house, which means it’s about 100-years-old, which means it’s scaring the crap out of every prospective buyer that sees it. It’s been running like a champ for us, and is another one of those things that we just didn’t get around to and couldn’t afford to update when we were remodeling. I posted about it years ago, and rolled my eyes when rereading the words I had typed. “I don’t know anyone else, besides us, who would buy a house with an almost 100-year-old boiler in it.” Awesome.

While we really do not want to have to replace the boiler, we did go ahead and have the house repainted in hopes of turning things around. By a haggard looking man named Larry, as in Larry’s Painting. He was incredibly reasonably priced, sweet to my kids, and despite all the cigarette butts he left lying around my house, he did a great job. No more peeling paint.

We’ve had 12 showings so far. Everyone loves the work we did inside, and now they love the outside, too. Except they want more closet space or a bigger third bedroom or blah, blah, blah. We have yet to meet Our People. Our People who decide this home is the one for them. The People who fall in love with it upon seeing the original woodwork in the foyer, just like we did.

Our People are out there. I know they are. In the meantime, I will continue to suck it up every time I have to re-clean our home from top to bottom, because there’s always just enough time between showings for it to get strewn with toys, clothing, crumbs and spills because we live with two small slobs children.

It’s probably a good thing that our house hasn’t sold yet, because we have yet to find anything we want to move in to. But I am getting excited to find our new home. To be The People that someone else is looking for.

3 thoughts on “I just buried a small Christian in my backyard

  1. Pingback: Sold! | A Constructed Life

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