Selling a House is like Having a Baby

Have you ever been involved in selling a house? We are currently selling our house and earlier this year we sold our mother's home. While this is something that has gone for ages, it always leads to surprise repercussions in the process. You may not have given birth, but there is some common ground in getting pregnant and preparing for a birth. Even with the six births of my children it seems like every time we survived the counting down of  months, days and finally the hours. The anticipation is amazing, but at the final few hours I often wanted just to forget about the birthing process. That is how it feels selling houses, you get almost to the point of exasperation and want to just stop the whole process.




Our house has been up for sale for three weeks. In the first week we found a house that we made an offer on. While we plan to downsize from over 2700 sq. ft. to over 1400 sq. ft., we need to do this in preparation for retirement and health concerns. The process of cleaning and weeding out the things that we no longer need or want is daunting. It does feel really good to lighten our load, yet it sometimes seems that we really have not removed very much. So far we have gone through the two kitchens, the three bathrooms, the laundry room, the family room, the video tape collection, my holiday decorations and family books. We have not packed a lot as we have no idea when we will actually move. After we finish the decorations then I must conquer my office and a few boxes in my bedroom.

When the final move comes we will pack the rest of the household items and my collections, many of which are breakable. I can just see that when we move into the new house that there will be a lot of things that we will not have room for. The family heirlooms and genealogy materials will have to be condensed. For now I work very hard to not be too stressed out. The best way to do that is to work on genealogy or read a good book. My mother's books continue to provide a good supply of reading material.

The genealogy work has come when it was needed most. My current clients know that we are preparing to move. While I will be a bit further away, we will make arrangements to continue with their family history. This week one person called to tell me how she had discovered somethings on ancestry.com and wanted to meet with me. It just so worked out that the next morning there was a showing of the house and we needed to be away for an hour. We met at the Family History Center and had a great time exploring. There were fourteen public family trees on ancestry.com and eleven on rootsweb.com. We reviewed each to see what viable information that they contained. There are so many tricks to viewing these trees, but we made some great discoveries. Then to put the icing on the cake we found a marriage certificate on the digital archives of Washington website. We both left feeling our time was very rewarding. The serendipity was in the chance phone call and my needing to be away from the house. Now she has new cousins to connect with and some homework on her genealogy.

For now we could use your good thoughts and prayers in helping us through the house selling process. There is no turning back, as with child birth we must move forward in faith and pray for help from above. Truly what is meant to be will be. This is true even in our genealogy research. If you don't see many posts for the next few weeks, you will know that I am very distracted. Thank you for your love and support.