49th: Use no reproachful language against any one; neither curse nor revile. Yesterday's Entries 2000: Keeping Up with Steve CURRENTLY READING T
race by Patricia Cornwell
Sheila
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OPEN HOUSE 12 October 2004 Peggy is in the process of selling her house. She tells me that the newspaper inadvertently ran an ad on a day she hadn’t expected and suddenly she began getting calls from people wanting to look at the house, which involved a quick pick-up to make it look presentable. (Knowing Peggy, I’m willing to bet that her "messy" house was as clean as I’d be getting my house for inspection by would-be buyers!) Hearing about that took me back to 1973, when we were in the process of selling our beloved home in Oakland and preparing to move up here to Davis. David was 18 months old when we moved here, so he was somewhere between 1 and 1½ when the house went on the market. That would have made Jeri barely 7 and the others in between. Think about what a house with five small children looks like!
We had had a couple of open houses and some folks who had shown up to check the place out. Trying to keep the house presentable when (a) you aren’t a housekeeper to begin with, and (b) you’re fighting these kids who really don’t like to sit on the couch all day so they won’t mess anything up, was putting a strain on all of us. But Easter weekend was coming up and we had not heard from the real estate agent, so we decided we could relax a bit, let the kids be kids for a couple of days. We also planned to go to San Francisco to an Easter egg hunt that Walt’s office was putting on for little kids. We’d been talking to the kids about it for days and everyone’s excitement was at an all time high. On Easter Sunday morning, as we were relaxing around the house after a nice Easter breakfast and before we had to leave for San Francisco, I happened to open the paper to see that our house was being featured as the day’s open house!! We flew into action, picking up things, cleaning things, scrubbing things. I’ve probably never moved as fast before or since. Finally the house was fairly decent and we piled all the kids in the car and headed to San Francisco. By the time we got to the location of the Easter egg hunt, it was almost over. There were hundreds of kids with baskets full of candy and our five wandered around looking in vain to find a single piece of candy. We felt just awful and promised them that we would make it up to them. But I’ll never forget it. Jeri, to whom "ceremonies" have always been more fun than just getting gifts, just glared at me and said "We would have found some if you hadn’t taken so much time to clean." The house didn’t sell that weekend and another open house was planned for two weeks later. The house was a two-story house and the top story was half finished. There was a small room up there and a door that led to the other half of the attic, which was exposed beams, on which Walt had put some planks so we could use it for storage. The day before the open house, I was up in the attic trying to get something out of storage. As usual, I was standing, balancing on two beams, when my foot slipped off of one beam and landed on the flat surface beneath it. "I wonder where that light is coming from," I mused. Then I looked more closely and discovered that I was looking down onto our living room. I had stuck my foot through the ceiling. I thought the real estate agent was going to die laughing when I called her. She cancelled the open house and Walt set about repairing the hole in the ceiling. The living room had exposed beams, so there were several sections, separated by wooden beams. This was fortunate because he only had to patch the hole and paint just the section with the patch in it. The people who owned the house before us had painted the living room and the leftover paint was in the basement, so we were fortunate to have paint that matched the rest of the room, and my little accident would not necessitate our having to repaint the entire living room. But there wasn’t much paint left and by the time Walt got to the end of the section, he was literally scraping bits of paint off the side of the can to spread on the ceiling and hope that it would blend in with the rest. In the end, it looked all right and eventually we managed to sell the house. But every time I think about selling this house and moving to something smaller (probably impossible now that we have Ms. Sheila who takes up so much room!) I cringe when I think about getting the house ready to sell and keeping it in a condition to be shown. I still think I’d rather die in the house and let the kids blow it up after we’re gone. Website of the Day Enough of this politics jazz. Check out this site for some cool animation. |
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PHOTO OF THE DAY
Superman, flying again. Christopher Reeve fought the good fight.
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Created 10/5/04
