Yesterday, both of us slaved our asses off getting the house presentable. The house and the yard haven’t looked this good in over a year. The patio is all cleaned off, and the back room is neat, uncluttered, and organized. He still wants to get some of the boxes that are stacked in a corner of the back room into the little room in there. He has the boxes where the main leak was, saying he trusts it’ll never leak there again. Well, it didn’t leak the last time it rained, but it’ll leak there again.

Anyway, it was so nice to wake up to a neat, organized house. It really eases my stress, cuz it not only looks better, but it also makes me feel like we’re closer to moving.

Steven was here at the house for 2½ hours. He was a bit disorganized, semi-gay-sounding, way too thin and tall, but nice enough. We think he’ll get the job done and that he has a little more experience and knowledge than Leona and her people did. He can also save us at least $20,000, as well as take care of more for us than Leona could. Leona couldn’t even have a contractor put a trash compactor in for us. This guy can.

He’s offering the model we want for $46,000. Leona’s company wanted $68,000. He says he has the same options available and even more. He was going to leave us a list of the options he’s got, but he forgot to. Just like he forgot to bring his tape measurer to measure the length of the house, but I already did that. He had the total square footage for this house which is 1471, not counting the garage. I thought it weird that it was an odd number, but this house itself is a bit odd. We figured the living room here is about 15x18, the master bedroom 15x15, the other bedroom 12x12, the kitchen 12x15, and the back room 30x15. These are approximations only, though. The width of the house is about 35’ and the length is about 40’. The property is about 100’ long and 45’ wide.

He was a typical salesman in the way that he bragged about how good he was and how bad others were. According to him, Leona doesn’t know her stuff when she asked if we could haul water when we mentioned it. She’d never even heard of hauling water. It’d be more convenient for us to have a well, rather than to haul our own water, but this guy may be able to drill us a well that’s affordable enough. The water table in Maricopa is about 700’.

I got a kick out of how he asked if this was a 2-bedroom after we just took him on a tour of the place.

He took off for about 10 minutes or so to look at other houses around the area that are for sale so he could get a good idea of what price to start with. We’re starting with what we know is too high - $85,000. He recommends we stick with that for a couple of weeks, then we can drop it lower. After Tom did some calculating, he told me we could end up selling for as low as $65,000 and still get most of the stuff we want for the new house. He said we can expect a lot of showings. We were surprised to hear this, and of course, I’m like - oh no! That’s all the more kids that are gonna come in here and trash the place. Naturally, Tom’s disagreeing with me, saying that they don’t trash things and they don’t come to look at houses with their parents. Yes, they do. Trust me, there’ll be plenty of kids in here, and they will trash the place while their parents act like nothing’s going on. They just don’t discipline their kids. It’s so rude to let an untamed kid of about 1-4 years of age who’s totally wild and destructive run loose in someone’s home. They don’t understand “no” at that age, and they need to be restrained. The show must still go on, though, so I’ll just take as much stuff as I can and get it out of kids’ reach.

He said our house would have an easier time selling in the summer than in the winter cuz of the pool. People like the idea of being able to move into a house and go swimming, but they couldn’t do that in December unless they could afford to heat the thing.

As I knew would be the case, he mentioned the fact that there are only 2 bedrooms and 1 bathroom as a negative, but the pool, covered garage, and other things make up for it.

So, although he’s gonna be the one to list this house, and take care of our new house and its prep work, he’s not necessarily going to be the one showing this house (yes, they will call first).

We didn’t take the sound blocks out yet. They’ll come out when the house is listed.

We have an application to fill out and fax to him, but since we still have the garage to do and the storeroom out back, we asked not to list the house till the 18th. I just can’t wait to see that for-sale sign! Can’t wait for the freeloaders to see it, too! I’ll want the whole world to see it! I’ll be sure to take pictures of it and include a copy for them. I asked Tom what he thought their reaction would be, and he said they’ll be thrilled. Maybe, maybe not. That depends on how much they’re gonna miss having someone around that they know damn good and well they can piss off with their antics. For all they know, the next people in here may not mind, and remember, these people want conflict. They love having enemies.

I still can’t decide who’s worse - the blacks or the Mexicans. That’s a tough call cuz the Mexicans don’t blast in 5-10 a day like the blacks did, but the blacks didn’t trash our yard and hang outside from 11 PM to sunup, either.

This morning they decided to take a break from the banging. I haven’t heard a sound since being up at 3:30 AM, except for the 7 AM honk of the gray/maroon van. They did have their front porch light on, though, and I heard the dog across the street go off for a few minutes at 4:00, so they were obviously out and about. Probably hanging out on their front porch. Fortunately, sound can’t travel into this house from their front porch like it can from their back patio. In back, it’s a straight shot to the house, pretty much, but part of their living room is in between our house and their front porch, so we can’t hear them from there unless they scream.

Yesterday morning I saw the same white car pull out that we saw early Saturday morning out front. Still no cream pickup. Just the van and silver car living there now.

Anyway, we should have about 6-8 more weekends left here! God, I hope no more than that!