Come See It!

This afternoon our house was the center of attention at an Open House hosted by our agent.

Once again the house got cleaned from top to bottom. Fortunately this time Hubby Tony was available to do half of the work. He took care of the vacuuming and general outside spiffing up. I polished all the glass surfaces, swept the kitchen floor, and cleaned the fingerprints off all the wood. As you might expect, the process was not without hitches. An hour before the event started I discovered a cat hairball in the middle of the bedroom floor, which led to do some frantic scrubbing.

Cleaning was the easy part. The hard part was figuring out what to do with the cats for a couple of hours. We all had to leave the house, but the cats do not like traveling in the car. (Probably because they've never gone anywhere in the car but to the vet.)  After some discussion, Tony and I decided that we would drive somewhere where we could park the car, then let the cats out of their carriers to roam around the car and hope for the best. We could eat our lunch and pass the time reading and enjoying the fresh air.

In my CR-V it's easy to put the back seats down to make a large flat trunk area. Right before we left Tony stocked it with the (cleaned) litter box and a plastic container of water. When the agent arrived Tony and I each grabbed a cat, stuffed him in a carrier, and took it out to the car.

As we left the neighborhood we saw Open House signs pointing the potential buyers towards our house. We ended up going to a nearby park. It took a couple of tries, but eventually I found a parking spot with enough shade for everyone. I opened the car's sun roof a tad and rolled down the windows a little to let the breeze in. Then we opened the carriers and encouraged the cats to come out.

Both were less than enthusiastic about the idea,  but Tony and I ignored them, got comfortable in our seats, ate our lunches, and read the newspaper. Eventually the cats poked their heads out and looked around. Both tentatively walked around the trunk area, but spooked every time they heard a loud noise outside. Jackson ultimately ended up squeezing into a tiny space left between the seat cushions and the floor. Pepper spent most of his time in the carrier napping.

After the paper had been thoroughly read we drove to McDonald's for coffee, then to the pharmacy to pick up a prescription. The actual open house was from noon until two in the afternoon, but the agent encouraged us to stay away until 2:30 in case there were any last-minute visitors. By the time we got home the agent was already gone.

Approximately a half hour later we received an email that told us that four groups of potential buyers had stopped by. All of them expressed positive feedback about our kitchen and the finished lower level, but one of them had an issue with the fact that we did not have a fenced back yard. It will be interesting to see if any of them are interested enough to follow up.

Five years ago today: Parting Is Such Sweet Sorrow