How to Sell your House Part IV: Iron Curtain Realty

Ahhh, where were we?  Right there.  Ok, so to recap: we've sold our house, put an offer on one house and didn't get it, and are now in an apartment.  We are in the sweet spot of transition with boxes everywhere, throwing money down the toilet on rent, and the germs of countless occupants festering in every corner of our abode.  Life is good.

Anyways, one day a little house appeared on my radar (my radar is a code word for zillow).  It was in a cute neighborhood and it was YELLOW.  I have a thing for yellow houses.  They look so cute and quaint and make me long for the good ole days of the 1950s, when I could vacuum and clean and look like this:

Instead of this:

As you can see, getting this house was vitally important to my physical appearance.  That is what a yellow house can do for you.  The only problem was that our agent was out of town.  As a result, her coworker was afforded the pleasure of meeting Team Frowow and enduring our banter and neurotic behavior.

This agent was not just any agent.  He was an EASTERN EUROPEAN agent.  I was so excited that  Andres practically had to give me mouth to mouth.  See, I'm a strange, weird, nerdy dork.  And during student teaching in college (which was one of the worst experiences of my life) I sought refuge in learning everything I could about Czar Nicholas II.  Why?  I have no clue.  In my defense, I believe it was my friend Sylvester (name changed to protect the guilty) who checked out every book on Russian Czars from the library.  I have three theories to account for our strange behavior:

a.  Sylvester had a research project that neither of us remember

b.  Our student teaching/internship experiences were so horrific that reading textbooks about Russia brought us joy

c.  We have serious problems

The answer is probably 100% C and 50% B.

Anyways, suffice to say that I was super excited and may have possibly thought for 10 seconds about leaving our sweet agent and hiring the Real Estate Czar.  Then, the following occurred.

The outside of the house looked something like this:

And before we even got through the front door, the agent wasted no time in explaining that the house actually looked like this:

Apparently, the Masonite siding was in absolute disrepair (to us it looked equal to or better than most Masonite siding we'd seen) and had a host of other problems,  including gray cabinets in the bathrooms (which I loved) and a painted deck.  He claimed that once you painted a deck, you were stuck with that color forever. Andres was like, "Uhhh, can't you just paint it a different color?"  According to the agent, that would be a no.  NO PAINT FOR YOU!  Every time he pointed out the flaws of the house he would say, "I show you these things."  Imagine hearing that every 10 seconds in an Eastern European accent.  I was annoyed with him, but simultaneously in Russian Heaven.  I'm weird.

The funny thing is, he never even mentioned the two main issues of the house: 1. the backyard (horrible landscaping, trees everywhere) and 2.  the fact that the master bathroom didn't have a door separating it from the master bedroom.  Instead, he started talking about a wonderful house in a different neighborhood that we would "just love."  Ummm, I'm not stupid buddy, stop pimping out your own listing.  

After he stopped "showing us these things" we traveled to a second house.  Upon getting out of the car he immediately said, "Oh, this is not good.  This is not good at all."  In our minds, it obviously wasn't good because the house backed up to a noisy street.  But in actuality, the house was not good because of the beige vinyl siding.  I know.  I know.  I will pause for a moment to allow you to think of something worse than living in a house with beige vinyl siding.

 

I couldn't think of anything either.
Evidently, beige vinyl siding is a problem because vinyl cannot be painted. (Hallelujah!  That's the whole point of the stuff!)  The agent told us in a very foreboding tone that we would be stuck with the color beige forever.  Maybe bad things happened to those with beige vinyl siding back on the bloc when he was growing up, I don't know.  But if you are one of millions of Americans with beige vinyl siding on your house, I'm sorry your life is a vast, barren wasteland. Try not to think about it and the feeling might go away.  Best of luck to you.

Well, once our agent came back into town she went to the YELLOW house and agreed that it was not the: 

that her coworker (who truly is a very nice person who is good at his job) made it out to be.  After lots of consideration about the backyard and the master bathroom, we decided to put an offer on the house.  Aannnnnnd....we were rejected!

What I am about to say holds no weight considering my blog is riddled with errors. 
The agent who wrote the rejection letter had the worst grammar ever.  Ever.
As I said, I realize I use horrible grammar on my blog.  But, it's a blog, not a professional document.  So I'm allowed.  For your reading pleasure, I will now share the first sentence of said letter:  
Thank you for your interest on our home. 
Ugh.  It still makes me cringe.  And it just got worse from there.  I had a great time using red font to fix all her errors, but Andres stopped me before I could forward it back to our agent to send to the seller's agent.  Boo.
Our agent was all, "You can try again with another offer," but I was all, "This house sucks.  We don't need this house.  This house needs us."

Yeah!  I don't need a yellow house to make me look good!  There are tons people out there who find this attractive:

Take that, 1950s-yellow house-pretty-cleaning-housewives!  POW!