So… I’m about to crack.  Scratch that, I have cracked.  We have been working pretty much nonstop on this house — getting it into selling shape — ever since we decided to sell.  That’s two weeks+.  Two weeks straight.  This is not counting the 3.5 years of nearly nonstop work we have already put into this place.  This is also not counting my full-time jobs of being nauseous and a full-time mom with two extremely busy twoddlers and also not counting Matt’s full-time job.  We work – that’s all we do. But somehow, the house is still a disaster; there are still a billion things to do; and no one would guess how much progress we have made.  The guy “fixing” my driveway worked a total of 3.5 hours in the last week and made nearly no progress.  We spoke with him about this after the first 2 hours of work in half a week and now he shows up even less.  We can’t try to sell the house until he’s done… he’s not remotely done… not sure what we are supposed to do.

We managed to buy our house in 2006, RIGHT before any housing market bubble bursts or future economy meltdowns.  Now, in 2009, 3.5 years later, after discussing prices with our realtor, we will be lucky to get what we paid for it 3 years ago.  Not counting the $25,000 worth of upgrades and improvements and the millions of dollars’ worth of blood, sweat, tears, and mental health that we have spent — that’s all a financial wash.

We’d love to be first-time homebuyers this time around and get some tax credit now that we need to buy a home to fit our family.  We’d love to have traded in my old clunker car to get the minivan this year when we could get extra cash for it instead of 2 years ago when  we did.  It seems we are always just a few years off from getting a break.  And yet, we haven’t been making these decisions to buy a house or get a van willy-nilly.  We’ve done what was needed and we’ve been really careful with our money.  It all seems a bit pointless when you stand where I am right now looking back and trying to understand how we so totally failed.

We had a house in mind to buy once we sell this one.  We looked at it again and aren’t as sure it’s the right one.  We looked at some other houses too… I guess it is too much to hope for to find a house that doesn’t need a ton of work?  I think of our family’s current status as needing to leave with no place to go, like being on a slowly leaking raft surrounded by miles of ocean.  It is beyond stressful.

I just needed to say all of that.  Now I’ve said it.  Just say to yourself in your mind, “Well, that sounds really hard.”  Because hopefully, that is what I’ve conveyed, and even if I haven’t, if you tell yourself that, I’ll count it as me having been successful.  I could do with some success.