ditching

May '95

Ditching Ravenwood Not as Easy as It Seems...

    This icky landlord investor made an offer $5K under the asking price, so my agent said we had to work up a counter offer, a real estate term for Math That Matters, one of my worst nightmares. And it's not just "math," it's real math that has to take into consideration imaginary equations that may happen or may not happen, depending on how long closing takes (adding another mortgage payment or penalty), problems the inspector may find wrong with the house that may or may not delay closing and may or may not cost me an additional bundle that the buyer may or may not take, split, or dump entirely on me, and AIEGHEEE...
    So after two hours of intensive MTM, we sent over the counter-offer and he responded snippily that he offered what the house was worth and that's that. I'm climbing over the desk screaming Why didn't slugworth put that on the top of the bid so we could counter-offer with Fat-chance slumlord?!! and my real estate agent tells herself that she's in for a long ride with me.
The roughest part of selling the house was the upkeep-- I had to make my bed every day! And I made a pact with my neighbor that neither of us would mow our lawn if the height was marginal and looked bad only when compared to an adjoining freshly mowed lawn.
    Finally we negotiated a completely break-even agreement with a nice Spanish-named couple (already getting into that California swing o' things), I signed over Power of Attorney to Dad and went to Daytona Beach for a week with Wayne's family (where we got to watch the space shuttle take off over the beach), and returned to my parents' house as a non-homeowner. (I'm lightly glossing over the final moving-out factor, where I literally emptied boxes of stuff into the bed of Dad's pick-up truck and ran upstairs, filling more boxes and dumping them into the truck bed because I didn't have enough boxes and having to call a plumber 48 hours before I left because water was pooling up on the bathroom floor, etc.)

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