So, right when I think things have gotten kinda crappy, a little lametastic and I spend my blog time whining about the injustice of it all, things get…just a little bit (A LOT) worse.

Stupid cranky old crusty anti-social neighbor lady who lived across the street from us moved out. We knew that the for sale sign was imminent. On Tuesday morning (pretty much write after posting my previous whiney, woah-is-me blog post), I looked out the window and saw the white sign swinging ever so gently in the breeze. Mike and I eagerly hopped on-line to look up the price. Hoping that she’d be priced insanely high making us look even better! (Especially considering that we’re already “priced to sell.”)

“Are you even kidding me?”

“That’s gotta be a typo.”

These were our first thoughts. Our second thoughts were more like this, “What the @$#@#(%*@#($*@(#$*@#(%@&(!#$@* That’s @#$*(@#)@$*)@#*%* ‘cuz @#$*(@#*%(@*#)%* and then @#$%*(@#$(*@%(*@#%^^&( so @#%(*@#(%*@#%)*”

Her house is priced nearly $50,000 less than ours. A nearly identical home. Now, there is a VERY major difference: walking into that house is like hopping out of a time travel machine and stepping foot in the foyer of 1976. We’re talking fuzzy pee-yellow wallpaper, poo-brown cabinets (do you see a body-function theme here?), vomit-colored carpet, thin flimsy whistling windows, etc. So, yes, a good $50k, EASILY, could be pumped into that home in upgrades, but, BUT…it still TOTALLY messes things up for us, and it just makes no sense whatsoever.

The house is priced $25k less than the tax appraisal value, but because they’ve priced it so insanely low, this STUPID LOW PRICE HOUSE (SLP-House, for short) will ruin us when we sell and have to get a bank appraisal. Our homes are similar eras, sizes and floor plans, so they will use her house as a comp in calculating our home’s value. ARGH. Grrrr.

Yes, there are some pro’s to this situation: sure enough, there’s been a flurry of real estate activity over there so naturally people pull one of our flyers as well, and we have had three showings since Tuesday morning (at least one of which was basically since they were already across the street so they called at the last minute to see if they could see ours too). Another pro: not everyone wants a fixer-upper, so if they see the pee-poo-vomit ‘70s SLP House and then come across to ours, our home automatically looks and feels newer, brighter, bigger, and better. But still…still…the whole thing has made us feel a bit like we’re swimming upstream now.

When I picked Zach up from the bus stop today, I told him that there was literally a line of real estate agent cars along the street just waiting their turn to visit the SLP House. Without skipping a beat, he said, “Were they doing the car conga line dance? You know ‘dah-dah-dah-dah-dah’ and then they open the doors instead of sticking their feet out! Dah-dah-dah-dah-dah-open doors, Dah-dah-dah-dah-dah-open doors,” He sange and danced his way home.

If only life were always as fun as it is in the mind of a five year old.