House showing- no news

Riley mowed the lawn for me. Of course I offered to pay him $20 for incentive. Trevor was supposed to do it, but when I got back from visiting the high school for "meet the advisor night" which was not very interesting, Trevor had not started. I had been hopeful he would have been finished. I even picked up DQ with Blizzards as a treat.

The advisor was nice. Riley's advisor is also his science teacher. He shook my hand told Riley to show me around and went back to his work. After all Riley knows his stuff. There is not much to talk about with a child doing so well. We were there about ten minutes. Long enough for Riley to show me around his class room and his binder for planning four years of high school with the graduation requirements.

Riley gets the game. He is easy. I told him he was going to college and we would help. He wants to work with planes. I told him he could be an engineer working with planes. He was pleased with that plan. It dovetailed quite nicely into his wanting to work with planes.

I tidied up and got the house ready for vacuuming after dinner. Riley was tired from mowing. he did a great job. He cut the grass down to the lowest level. It looked great, but that is a hard cut with this mower. Its a push mower and tends to get stuck in the lower level on our uneven lawn.

I figured the boys would be off to school the next day so I could finish up while they were gone. Thank goodness I wasn't working that day. I was free to really get down and clean uninterrupted.

Trevor and I have been at logger heads recently. He has come to realize he will be in eighth grade again. But it will be a whole new environment. He might enjoy it. Trevor's contribution to readying the house was to clean his room of dirty clothes and start a load of laundry, take out the garbage and vacuum just his room. So the chores he usually does, no extras. He did not get paid for helping other than the DQ dinner. I just couldn't get him to do any more.

Once they went to school the next day I vacuumed. The house looked as good as when Tom does it. One of the reasons to give credit where it is do, was last weekend we all pitched in and did a cleaning with Tom home participating. It really made a difference only having one week of accumulation to take care of. The piles of papers had already been dealt with. I had even tackled a small path through the garage mess last weekend. That was why the broken lawn mower was in the trunk of my car. I was off to donate it to the repair shop during the showing. The repair shop takes old lawn mowers. It is great recycling.

I moved the cars to new spots to open up our driveway. I asked my neighbor to move her camper off our driveway, where she likes to park. Now here is where my stress level really went up. She forgot to move the camper. My real estate agent has told me three times now her camper is hurting our sales potential. People are not liking the camper in the driveway. It is not even her driveway. So I had to tell my neighbor she was no longer welcome to park it in our driveway.

I probably would not have been so harsh if she had remembered to move it, but if I lost a sale because of her camper I was upset. There was interest a couple of times, but the buyers had gone with other homes. Who knows if their choosing the other houses had to do with the camper eating up space on our driveway. Flag lots have long driveways, but they are for the owners, not the neighbors to use.

My other neighbor who does share our driveway had been wondering why the camper seemed to always be there. They didn't like it at all. So it was not a hard decision just to tell her she needs to get gravel and make an RV pad in her own driveway. I park on the grass at my house. Why can't she. After all I park on my grass because she is taking up the spare parking on our driveway. It is not her driveway. I was a little frustrated with the conversation. She seemed to think she had the right to use it. She didn't want to find a new home while our house was for sale. She knows how long that could take. We are surrounded by for sale signs. But I really have to make this house as beautiful as possible. The camper, even though she keeps it up better than we keep up our cars, does not help.

She moved it, but not until after the showing. Thus my firm approach that she can no longer use our driveway as her personal parking lot. We have a town open house next weekend, 30 homes and a tour. We are not on it, but I thought we could put out the sign and have it ready to show for the drive buys. It is getting close to the time I want a contract. The boys will be out of school in June. We can move with impunity. We just have to close on the big house so we have somewhere to go.