Sold

Today I sold my house. The picture is my former backyard and it was for that view that I compromised on everything else I thought I was looking for when home shopping some seven years ago. It is an otherwise modest townhouse in a quiet cul de sac, many miles from Washington up a difficult stretch of 95. It was my dog's first home too. The hardwood I replaced the carpet with bears many scribbly claw marks and the wall in the hallway outside my old bedroom bears a light shadow from years of her body settling for the night in that spot.

What strikes me most about this sale though is how it came about. I knew I was leaving in February last year to move here and heaped coals on my head in advance for all I wasn't going to do to prepare the house for sale. When I finally left in September, I came back almost every weekend to do additional painting and repairs, finally putting it on the market for two weeks before becoming pissed at my realtor and demanding she just put it up for rent. Almost the same day, I had this fantastic renter and a mere two months after she moved in, she sent me an e-mail asking if I would be willing to sell it to her. Now for the two weeks I had the house for sale last year, I was getting feedback from my realtor about what my house wasn't. Over the years I had invested in the infrastructure of my house, replacing windows, floors, doors, heat pumps, water heaters and fixing anything that would compromise the integrity of the structure from within. All this meant my house was solid but not terribly big on the design elements. It was lovely enough but it wasn't exceptional. Do you see where I'm going here with the house as an analogy for me? I don't mean to beat a sick horse to death-that one is for you Boomka.

I was smug yesterday when the FedEx package came with the closing documents. I was thinking, 'Ha! I didn't need a slick and fancy new stove so that someone would want my house. Someone loved it and recognized the value of what I put into it.' Today thinking of the house again as an apt analogy for how I approach the world, my smugness is tempered a bit. I work on myself, I want always to be better, but I focus most of my effort inside or into accomplishments and competency and not so much on the window dressing. Just like when I was showing my house, the feedback is something along the lines of, "I really like her, she's got a lot of great features. For the price though, I think there should be new appliances and countertops. Pass or see if she will accept less."

I know I can do better with reflecting my value to the world in the way I dress. We probably all can. As much as I view this sale as validation that value can be recognized, even when it isn't vying for your attention with fancy tile work and elegant staging, I also think there is room in my life for improvement to sometimes try to look as awesome as I am. To really knock it out of the park and wear good deodorant to hide the anxiety that attention to my "staging" would bring.

But the big object lesson in this for me is realizing that after all the fretting I'd done before moving about getting the house on the market, and then getting feedback about what my house didn't have, someone came along out of nowhere and just wanted it. She wanted if even if the appraisal came back for less than I was asking. She wanted it as-is and did not ask me to change or fix a thing as a condition of sale. I can't help but hope that I'm as lucky in love.