Offers Are In

As of noon today we have six offers on the house.  They're all over list price, some by as much as 5%.  Now our agent is putting out 'best and final' counter; essentially he sends everybody who's made an offer a description of the best offer on the table.  They try to beat it (if they want to).  Then, I guess, we pick the best offer.

Bink, in collar and tie.  He's preparing for Escrow.

It's been about as painless as it can be so far; we're lucky, I guess, in that we have a house that people want.  Of course I attribute that to our incredible good taste and decorating skill (not to mention my wife's reverence for the house, and ongoing insistence that we maintain it as well as we can).  But who knows.  The whole process awakes a complex stir of emotions.  On one hand, it's nice to feel like you have something people want--to be desired, in a way.  Two different clients, we're told, have told our realtor that "this is their house."  Yesterday afternoon I looked out the window to find two people standing at the foot of our driveway surveying the property.  They were discussing the tree, they were discussing the view.  Clearly they were imagining themselves in it.

That's the unsettling part of the whole thing--the sense not of losing the property, but of losing its meaning.  This is the house where we started our marriage.  This is the house where we dealt with the vicissitudes of California.  It's filled with our meaning--things we did here.  People we have over, movies we watched.  Everything.  And those meaning are about to emptied out.

My wife wants to take the front door with us when we go.  It's unlikely this will be possible (the door is a statement piece; it has a complicated stained glass and wrought iron pattern on it) but I understand, fully, the desire.  We want to retain something of who we were when we lived here.