We are here.  Yes, already.  In the blink of an eye, we are into Week Six in our Eleven Weeks of Summer Vacation.  And I can not believe that it is more than half over.  Where did the time go?

Well, for us it was a whirlwind of house nonsense.  Back in the spring I had started looking for a new house.  I was mainly looking for a bigger kitchen, a bigger basement, and a bigger yard (yes, size matters – let’s be real).  And right around the time that Kid A graduated from high school, I had found what I called The One… it had a bigger everything, plus a salt water pool and a hot tub.  I wanted it so badly.  It wooed me so effectively that I dismissed its (albeit, few) glaring flaws as “charming” and “additive of character.”  But after a lot of negotiation, it turned out not to be The One.  Just like in high school, I would have had to pay a much bigger price then I was willing for it to be mine.  And I couldn’t do it.  So, with my heart a little broken but my honor intact, I moved on.

Meanwhile, we had aggressively priced and listed our current home in order to make our offer on The One stronger and more appealing.  We totally glammed it up, and it looked good.  In less than a week we had multiple offers.  We accepted the cleanest one (full price plus, no closing costs, no contingencies) because after our brief hook-up with The One we were confident that there was a bigger, better house out there for us.  Dice rolled.

I would also like to mention that the moment our realtor planted his sign in our front yard, I started receiving texts and phone calls from my neighborhood friends.  I was definitely feeling the love.  They all told me that we could not move, even to the neighborhood right next door.  Some even swore to shun me if we went through with it.  I think several of them were concerned that they would inherit the title of Craziest Lady in the Neighborhood once I left.  So I appeased them with invitations to future hot tub parties.  And I wore the For Sale sign around my neck like a bold, scarlet letter as I went back to my search for the perfect house.

Within days I found it.  We called it Sugar’s House after the sweetest old golden ever.  She kept watch (and by “kept watch” I mean “took a nap in the front office”) every time we came to look at her owner’s beautiful home.  I could actually feel the love inside that house as I walked through it.  I could also feel my girl parts tingling over the gorgeously renovated kitchen, brick-surround fireplace, and master bath (complete with a shower-for-twelve).  Sugar’s House was soon going to be our family’s home.  I just knew it.

But then the buyer for our home backed out at the eleventh hour (I’m so serious… the contract termination came through at 11PM on a 12 midnight deadline).  Sheepdog and I had been at a wedding at the Atlanta Botanical Gardens all evening, where I had made friends with several vodka cranberries.  I may or may not have mentioned to other wedding guests that I was wanting to punch the game-playing buyer in the vagina when she tried to bully us into conceding money for things we already took into consideration when we priced our house so aggressively.  And she knew exactly what she was doing because she was in the business of real estate.  So we called her bluff.  But then she walked.

So here we stand, robbed of our original marketing momentum and feeling the sting of a too good to be true buyer.  To be honest, it hurts to have somebody break up with you like that.

But there is still hope for us.  We decided to take our house off the market (no more showings or inspections…yippee!) and we decided to love our own house again.  It has great bones and over the past seven years we have turned it into our home – a home that is filled with great memories and love and laughter, just like Sugar’s house.  And soon I’ll be making a phone call to the contractor so our kitchen and master bath can look like Sugar’s as well.  I’m getting tingly parts already!

Wish me luck for tomorrow…