Thursday, April 02, 2009

The first lap

Wednesday last week represented a milestone in my race to live under brighter skies. Finally, I had chucked out enough books and furniture and clothes and small household items to see the back of every closet, the bottom of every drawer, the surface of every shelf. Finally, I had cleaned out enough cupboards, vacuumed up enough dust, washed enough surfaces and painted enough walls, windowsills and baseboards. Finally, all the blinds were repaired/cleaned, and new Roman blinds covered the venetian ones (something I had never quite gotten around to before). It was time to list.

And list I did. My place is now officially for sale. Hurray. Now, all I have to do is be a fastidious Zen housekeeper and keep things well-enough organized that the place can be shown anytime (once I squirrel the twenty-year-old stained coffee-maker out of sight, hide the dirty dishes in the dishwasher, put the toothbrush in the drawer, and generally remove my own "living" traces from the place).

The place looked nice yesterday for its first Open House - I even added flowers. It's not a showcase, but it's attractive, fresh, clean, shiny, all the things that attract buyers, hopefully some buyers are enough attracted by the lowish price to want to bite. The realtor said that 8 parties, including three agents with buyers, had visited in under 2 hours. After he left two more groups of people, residents in the building, came by to look. One group was a young couple with a baby about 2 years old, who at the moment have a one-bedroom.

I think this bodes well - already 10 groups of traffic through a place that's been listed for only four days.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

The place looks great - good luck with the sale.
Keith (from the UK)

Unknown said...

Sounds like you did a lot of hard work, and the place does look great. If a house/condo got 10 viewings in the first four days here it would pretty much be a miracle. Folks in the U.S. are still trying to figure out whether the economy will get any worse.

I hope all goes well.

Diane Jacobs said...

Thanks guys. I had to dig deep for the energy, and yes, it was a lot of hard work. Physical and mental and emotional. (I'm another 5 pounds lighter.)
There will be a "showing" tomorrow, by a realtor who is taking a prospective buyer around on a tour of condos for sale in Vancouver. I'm hoping for a real bite, not just a nibble.