On renting

I learned a couple of things from renting our house:

1. You can wash your garage door windows! Yes. Indeed. We never once washed those windows in 13 years in the house. It had never occurred to us. At least not to me. Consequently, there was a build-up of fine gritty dirt and grime on the windows that more or less obscured the light shining in. (Luckily, we have a regular window in the garage's side wall bringing in southern light, so the garage wasn't completely dungeonlike). And voila, once we washed that row of windows, a miraculous thing happened. We can see through them! I go into our light-flooded garage, glance up and can actually see the driveway and our cars and the yard, as clear as if I were looking through glass! Which I am! It's a wonderful sight.

2. Bathroom rugs won't make or break a deal. I didn't need to go out and buy those two new bathroom rugs just because we had a dropped a tiny splotch of bleach on the corner of one rug. But I did. I rushed out yesterday to a store having a sale and found a little blue reversible rug for the master bath and while I was at it, one in tan for the downstairs half bath. Because if I hadn't, the house wouldn't have been perfect and that meant maybe nobody would rent it!! But you know what? A family had already decided to rent our house, even with that little pink discolored spot on our rug! However, we do now have two nice, albeit small rugs to put on our bathroom floor in Barnesville.

It is a huge relief that our house has rented and to a family that seems perfect. That was the last big piece in the puzzle of moving to Barnesville. Now, it's a matter of packing, making arrangements with the utilities, phone, banks etc., canceling the health club membership and the newspaper, notifying the post office of our forwarding address and ... moving.

So, I can breathe easier and the house doesn't have to stay perfect from top to bottom all the time! I'm also freed from my worries about what our 1970 tract house doesn't have: no glamorous oversized master bath, no walk-in closets, no two-story entrance foyer, no granite countertops. We have a plain linoleum floor in our kitchen. We are down a long driveway and front to a bike path, which is nice, but we also have neighbors a stone's throw away on either side. While to me the house is large, by the standards of today, our home is merely average sized. We're in a pleasant neighborhood and have had wonderful neighbors, but the house is not the newest nor the poshest! Our kids will miss the house though: they've lived here almost all of their lives and are attached to it.

Now, I can return to the mountain of freelance writing I've been putting off to get the house in shape to rent. While it's been a little nerve-wracking, I've been following that inner guide which told me to concentrate on getting the house ready and that the freelance work could wait! That's pretty counterintuitive in the newspaper biz, so I'm praying that inner voice was right.

Anyway, I can get back to work without the fear of being jettisoned from my home office, aka the living room, at any moment by a prospective renter wanting to tour the house. Hurray!