Saturday, April 29, 2017

the river house #14: selling, staging and sexism...

We are up to our necks in houses, houses, HOUSES!  

Y'all, it's crazy.  It's the hot time of the market, so we need to get our current house up for sale.  

But the only problem is, what if it sells?!

Because if it does, then this is what I currently have.  

(and if you can't tell, that's not exactly live-able)

We are STILL insulating and fixing all the other thousand little things that need doing in order to get drywall.  

BEFORE: replacing the rotted wood on the back porch
AFTER: the porch is painted and the yard is landscaped
But first, in order to get listed on the market, we've had to switch our energies into our current house.

 I planted flowers for that extra pop of curb appeal.
Speaking of curb appeal, each year the city's Easter festival is in our neighborhood, and literally thousands of cars drive by our house that day, so it was important for us to be looking spiffy as we announced our house was coming for sale soon!

So in a typical day, I literally go from exterior work...

 ...to interior decluttering...


















...to hanging insulation at the River house...

It's too much, you guys.

Moving is hard enough.

But renovating one house while staging and selling (and ultimately packing up) another is too much.

And to make matters worse, we fired our contractor.

(What?!?  I know.)

Yeah, we're now on our own with no help.  Just when we probably need it the most.

I could literally write an entire blog post about the interchange the morning I fired him.  It was so, so bad.  It was just me and him, but thankfully our intern, Audrey, heard part of it word-for-word and was there for me after it was all said and done.

What started as me calmly expressing some concerns about the hours that he was reporting quickly (so QUICKLY!) escalated into him using loud, threatening language.  I was caught in a situation where I was trying to keep things professional, and it was like I was talking again to my explosive young children who often don't have the capability to use calm words.  Except this was an adult.

When his buddies drove up on the street, he stormed out to talk to them, which provided me the opportunity to attempt to stop physically shaking.  But when I heard his inappropriate comments to his buddies about us, and then about ME BEING A WOMAN, that crossed a line.

So when he walked back in to speak to me again, I calmly confronted his choice of words about me as a woman.  And his sexist response only dug his grave deeper. ("Oh," he said as he cocked his head to the side and wriggled his fingers in my face, "that's because you women have FEELINGS.")  I was still trying to logically figure out some of his pricing discrepancies in order to resolve the situation, but it was like an animal who had been backed into a corner.  He was flipping out, threatening to quit, attacking me.  It was time for him to pack up.

What in the world, y'all?  How does he think he can treat someone that way?  Um, no.

So it's a new day.

We'll figure it out.

It's nice that my house is pretty stinkin' clean as we go on the market Monday.

But keeping it that way with my two children is going to drive us ALL crazy.

To be continued...









1 comment: