Pins and Needles: Waiting...

Throughout the process of either buying or selling a house, there are critical points that become stressors to the point of sleeplessness, fidgeting, wandering minds and frustration. When you are both buying and selling a house at the same time, the stress is compounded.

We have gotten past the all important point of agreeing to terms on both the selling of our house and the purchasing of a new one. I assure you, selling involves much more anxiety than buying. The relief of negotiating an offer that doesn’t result in a sucking chest wound is short lived. Next comes the inspection, paid for by the buyer.

In a perfect world, when you pay for an inspector to look at your new home, you get a real hard-ass, detailed oriented inspector with years of experience while the other person paying a guy to look at the house you are selling finds the cheapest most inexperienced slacker they can find who just wants to get paid and get out. And this is where the pins and needles come in.

We found an inspector to look at the home we plan to buy who was very thorough. Looking at the new home we want, he found dozens of things I would have never even seen much less realized were wrong. How people can buy a house and not pay to have a professional inspector look at it is beyond me. As the list of items needing correction added up, my wife and I became more and more anxious contemplating what the list of problems on our current house would look like. The house is 35 years old; there is bound to be something (besides the furnace we just replaced). The items found by the inspector in the new house are all things that should be easily fixed if the seller wants to sell the house – to anybody, not just us. But when you are selling a house that was built in 1976, for that matter, when you are buying a house that is 35 years old, where do you draw the line on “problems”?

At this point, all we can do is wait. At least once we know what the inspector – the one we hope is a slacker – finds wrong with our house, then we can determine how to fix it or risk the deal by suggesting that if they want the house, they’ll learn to live with whatever it is like we have.

I am genuinely hoping that there is not some local blogger who was walking around the HEB around 6:30 PM this evening with a camera waiting for a goofy person to take pictures of. I ran down there to grab some printer paper and it did not occur to me until I went to put my keys in my pocket that I had failed to properly dress myself before leaving the house. I blame my wife for this since she was leaving the house at the same time to go do Zumba and did not alert me to my situation.

So yes, if you were at HEB and saw some dork walking around with his gym shorts on backwards, it was me.