We table our hunt until I finish my book tour in May. In the interim, our friend has to deal with some family business, so she helps us select a local Realtor named Nancy.
Nancy asks what kind of house we’d like and I send her a seven-page manifesto on what my ideal home might be. Attached to that are dozens and dozens of houses from the MLS with notes on what I like and dislike about each of them. (Two enthusiastic thumbs up on pools, fenced yards, and brick, and two down for Dryvit, lack of basements, and anything mauve.)
I anticipate that our search will be endless because when we were looking in late winter/early spring, we saw so many places and the few that were right didn’t work out. I figure the process will take a few months and that we’re going to have to make tons of trips so we can see everything on the market. And that’s totally cool because I love seeing how other people live. For someone as snoopy as I, the notion of opening refrigerators and peeking in closets with impunity as part of a decision-making process is a dream come true. What kind of soap do they use? How many shoes do they have? This is the kind of stuff I need to know.
The thing is, Nancy is not only the spitting image of Jane Lynch’s character in Best in Show, [Less butch, though. She wore pretty shoes, lipstick, and had a shell pink mani/pedi.] she has the same no-nonsense personality, too. Out of the forty places I’m dying to see, she immediately dismisses almost all of them for a variety of reasons (e.g., you don’t want to deal with a foreclosure, the place is overpriced and underwater, the seller isn’t serious, etc.) and my dream of learning the Secret Lives of North Shore Wives dies immediately.
Nancy takes us to exactly four houses.
But I’ll be damned if each of them isn’t exactly what we want.
She is the Real Estate Whisperer. [Or a consummate professional who knows a dawdler when she sees one.]
We narrow our choices down to two homes—a neighborhood-y Tudor style where the interior is move-in ready without a fence or pool, and a tree-surrounded Colonial that needs a face-lift in the decorating department but the yard boasts lots of rosebushes and an in-ground pool.
I bring Stacey to see both of them and despite its being filled with window treatments she refers to as “Satan’s Golf Pantaloons” she believes we’ll be happier in the Colonial. She says you can’t deny the place’s good bones, notwithstanding the owners’ deep and abiding love of monkey-covered wallpaper. [As it turns out, the monkey wallpaper is bank. And it stays.]
The time elapsed from making an offer to moving in is a little over a month, which isn’t nearly enough time to pack everything and yet affords me ample opportunity to freak the hell out.
Until this moment, the most expensive thing I’ve ever purchased is a handbag and here I am, saddling myself with thirty years of debt. THIRTY YEARS. And you know what? Handbags never need new roofs. Handbags don’t flood or catch on fire. Handbags don’t get termites. Handbags have never made me eat sea urchin. When I get bored with a handbag, which, coincidentally occurs every 1.38 years, I’m not obligated to keep carrying it. I can just get something new without involving Realtors and banks and mortgage brokers and attorneys. Yes, I’ve complained about living in eighteen places, but just about every time we moved, I’ve been ready to go.
But now, like it or not, I’m going to have some real roots in this new place. And that terrifies me.
What are we going to do in a home where we’re responsible for everything? As of now, every time something breaks in our place we giggle and say, “That sounds expensive!” and then we call Dick. Generally he does nothing until we withhold our rent, but at least it gets done eventually and not on our dime.
During a particularly panicky moment, Fletch sits down next to me on the deck and says, “If you want to grow up, this is your chance. Being an adult isn’t just paying taxes and investing in a Roth IRA; it’s about making decisions that scare you and following through with them anyway. However, if for any reason you feel we’re not ready, we can stay here.”
I’m generally not one who believes in signs, but when I hear a gunshot in the distance after he says this, I pay attention. We close on our house two weeks later.
The best day of my life isn’t when we’re handed the keys to our new place. Rather it’s today, the day after we close. Fletch left early this morning to run some items up to our new place. I head north, too, only I have to take Maisy to chemotherapy first. (Loki always comes with us because what dog doesn’t enjoy a road trip?)
Maisy receives her treatment and is in excellent spirits as we spend the next twelve minutes driving from the clinic to the house. When we pull into the garage, the dogs are confused and as I let them loose in the new, empty house, they go crazy Vegas-style. They might not understand the details, but they grasp the concept that this is somehow now theirs.
Fletch is out back replacing lightbulbs but when I let everyone fly into the yard, they don’t even notice him—or all the grass and trees and roses—because they’re so distracted by
