The Horrors of House Sales

I sold my house last night. I spent a month cleaning, purging and painting. Now I’ll spend the next few months packing.

The last time I moved, I had five small kids ranging in age from two to 12. Now I’m housing seven, most of them teens. You’d think selling a house would be simpler now that they’re old enough to be useful. You’d be wrong.

True, I was able to recruit a lot of help when it was time to repaint. But I’ll warn you right now: The fact that someone is old enough to wield a paint roller does not mean their efforts will increase the value of your home. When my 15-year-old painted our upstairs bathroom, she had a blast. She loaded up the roller with gobs of ocean-blue paint, then attacked the walls with gusto. When she was done, the white ceiling, white tub, white toilet, white sink and white counter all looked like someone had sprinkled them with thousands of bits of blue fairy dust. I spent two nights repainting the ceiling and scraping blue flecks off every porcelain and linoleum surface in the room.

My oldest son offered to repaint the kitchen while I tackled the halls. We both forgot that he’s color blind (it’s not something that comes up in normal day-to-day conversation). So he gave our dingy yellow kitchen a fresh coat of yellow paint. He didn’t fairy dust the way the kid in the bathroom did, but he didn’t cover all the old paint, either. He missed chunks—big chunks (turns out dingy yellow and fresh yellow look exactly the same to him). I spent that evening repainting roughly 25% of the kitchen, filling in all the spots he missed.

Even cleaning with teens can be traumatic. One of the younger ones decided—while vacuuming the cobwebs out of the basement—to unplug the sump pump. I have no idea why (turns out, neither did he). Next time I wandered downstairs, I landed in a small, smelly indoor pond.

One daughter decided—in a lame attempt to avoid cleaning—that she’d start packing, instead. She collected every single book she owned and stuffed them all into her trunk. When she was done, the trunk weighed approximately 200 pounds (it was so heavy, the wood split when she tried to lift it up).

Sadly, the house tried to sabotage my efforts, too. As soon as I voiced the possibility of moving, the cistern pump committed suicide. We spent four days with no running water. The furnace died within 24 hours of getting the cistern fixed, and three hunks of drywall mysteriously fell off the wall the day the For Sale sign was hammered into the front lawn.

Not to be outdone, my cat was quick to register his objection to the move. He decided that, as long as strangers were traipsing through our home, the litter box would remain pristine clean and he would use the basement floor as his toilet. And our Great Dane, Percy—through no fault of his own—developed a medical emergency and needed to have his leg amputated. He’s been sprawled across the couch, drugged and shaved, with his swollen stump exposed ever since. Not a real selling point on the MLS house listings, I’m guessing.

Despite all of this, there’s now a Sold sign on our front lawn. How did I do it? Lots of wine—and whining. And I’ve made myself a promise: The next time I need to sell a house filled with kids and pets, I’m moving the kids and the pets out, first!

Did you enjoy this article? Subscribe to my blog and you’ll never miss my once-a-month posts! It’s easy: Just enter your email address in the upper right corner of this page. I’ll never sell, share, or rent your contact information.