Waiting
I’m learning that selling a house has two major phases: the somewhat mad scramble to get ready and the somewhat maddening waiting as people look things over.
The first phase went quickly enough despite the miles and miles of baseboards that grew in the night and needed fresh paint in the morning. Though I might have, well, did grumble at the process, it had its own satisfactions and was easy to measure: this much paint applied, these many books cleared away, and that much floor space revealed. All visible changes and all very much controllable.
The second phase is moving along as dozens of people troop through the house hoping it’s the right place for them, imagining their things in rooms that still hold a lot of signs of us, and if they look closely enough, the four families who lived here before us: Hoeys, Hicks, Petits, and Gomery-Powells.
The clearest signs come from the Gomery-Powells and the Petits though their colour palettes of green and beige have vanished under our yellows. The Hicks, we think, were the family that severed the land making way for our neighbours’ bungalow. The Hoeys were here from 1914 through the second world war when the house (with, yes, one bathroom) held seven adults during Ottawa’s wartime housing shortage. During the Hoeys time there were lilacs lining the back yard, peonies along the sunny side of the house, and a well out back where a maple tree now stands. The Hoeys and maybe the Hicks were here when there was a marshy area just beyond the dogleg in the road.
This is the hard phase of selling, with unsatisfying measures of progress: this many people at an open house, this many first showings, this many second showing, this many bookings coming up. Very little remains in our immediate control as we can’t magic up a second bathroom, make the basement deeper, or get rid of the small apartment building you can see from the back porch. And much as I wish it, it’s hard to make people instantly love this old, well-loved, and well-used house but soon enough there will be lilacs, bleeding hearts, forget-me-nots, and peonies.
