Following a whirlwind month spent racing to get our house in Boise on the market, late June and early July of 2020 brought a disjointed, hurry-up-and-wait downshift. And a nerve-wracking one at that.

Given how blazing hot the Boise real estate market was – even in the middle of a raging pandemic – we had expected the house to sell fast, and “fast” in the Boise market had come to mean as little as one day, and often following a bidding war. Behavior was bordering on vampiric. A real estate story in the state newspaper illustrated this point by referencing a Seattle doctor who purchased a house in Boise sight unseen – for a move he wasn’t planning on making for another six months. Last time we sold a house, 14 years prior in northern New Hampshire, was a much different scene: a sagging market in a struggling mill town, a months-long slog colored by a botched sale and deafening silence, ever-decreasing expectations until the house eventually sold for a modest profit that barely covered our moving expenses to Boise. But at least there wasn’t a pandemic. Not that it mattered much in the 2020 real estate world. For-sale signs and open houses were still popping up everywhere, and people were still clamoring to buy houses in Boise – the only change being that prospective buyers touring homes were required to wear masks and shoe condoms and let their agent do all the touching.

Our expectations were heightened even more following 13 showings in the first nine hours our house was on the market June 25. We were giddy and restless that Thursday evening as we waited to hear from our realtor with the first offer, even though we told Andrea we wouldn’t make a decision until the end of the weekend. But after hearing nothing, we took our nervous energy to bed and did our best to try to sleep. It mostly worked.

The next day, on Friday the 26th, we finally heard back from Andrea, but not with any mind-blowing offers – or any offers at all. Instead, she shared the initial feedback she was hearing from buyers’ agents, and it wasn’t promising. For as much as the house had been gussied up with bad art and fake fruit and staged to look more spacious than it really was, prospective buyers were seeing right through the smoke and mirrors and zeroing in on what Andrea called the “atypical quirks” of our home, such as:

-The kitchen was small.

-The laundry closet next to the dining area next to the small kitchen was awkward.

-The bonus room felt like a garage – which was accurate because indeed, it once was a garage.

-The one-car garage that actually was a garage was detached from the house and thus lacked an entry point into said house.

-The faux-island hardscaping in the back yard – a bad idea when the original owners installed it in the ‘60s and one that quickly lost its exotica kitsch appeal after we moved in – looked like a headache to maintain because indeed, it was a headache to maintain.

There also was the matter of the exterior, which we were still painting when the house went on the market. My wife, Erica, is an artist and professional painter, so historically I have assumed the role of day laborer for painting projects and stayed out of her way except to hand her occasional beers. But as we found ourselves running out of time, I ended up picking up a brush, too. We had five sides left to finish – all in the back hidden from street view – and I was left with the feeling that, psychologically, our half-painted house was playing mind games with potential buyers, even though we reassured all parties involved that the job would be done in a matter of days.

Painted house or no, there was little more we could do but sit and wait for what is known in the real estate business as the quote-unquote right buyer to come along. And sitting and waiting was already proving to be frustrating and exhausting. Every time a showing got scheduled, we had to vacate the house and take our cat and dog with us. Which doesn’t sound difficult on paper, but with an ailing 12-year-old dog who had to be lifted in and out of the truck, walked at a clip of one mile an hour and often forgot he was inside when he dunked his butt down to take a dump, some minor logistics were involved. The showings were rarely back to back, and the text alerts often popped up 30 minutes before a scheduled showing time, so we had to keep ourselves (and our tidy house) as prepared as possible to leave at a moment’s notice. And then we had to figure out where to go and what to do, and with a stressed-out cat and slow-moving dog in tow, our options were limited. By default, we usually ended up at the park two streets over, and depending on how much time we had to kill, we would either sit inside the truck or outside on the ground, trying to keep morale high and discomfort low as we loitered under the summer sun.

After two straight days of this with zero offers on the table, Andrea called an audible that none of us had expected to pull from the playbook: an open house. Her listings were averaging four days on the market, and clearly ours was going to be the wrong type of exception if we didn’t try another approach. Given the choice between Saturday and Sunday, we opted for Sunday the 28th to buy us time that Saturday to regroup, reassess and run errands before a slate of afternoon showings. I called my own audible and bought something like three dozen bags of fresh mulch, and spreading it around the back yard, my bare arms and blue jeans turning black from the chemical dye sweating off the wood chips, felt something like an act of desperation.

We killed time during the open house at my brother’s, day drinking on the back patio and visiting with his family, anxiously awaiting word from Andrea. When we finally heard from her, the surface-level report was positive: 21 groups through the house in three hours, including one “very interested” buyer who brought their agent with them. The full report the following day, however, was not so positive: a mirror image of the previous report noting the same atypical quirks. You could almost hear our nerves fraying, and the screaming out back on the other side of the chain-linked fence was pulling us further away from the zen-like state of mind we had been trying to maintain.

Years ago, a large family had moved into the rental home bordering our back yard – and when I say bordering, I mean that the back of their house was so close to ours that you almost make out what they were having for dinner from our living room couch. The house’s owner was a quiet, friendly widower whose only strike against him, if you could even call it that, was having a knack for starting up his lawn mower the moment we sat down for Sunday dinner. We never knew where he moved or what happened to him, but we did know that at some point he sold the house to his tenants. Then they started having more children. And more children. At last count they had six, and based on our observations – and we had a front-row view of their lives through our back window – their style of parenting and pet ownership, in lieu of traditional methods of loving guidance and discipline, was to shove all the kids and the dogs into the back yard and let nature take its course. When they purchased a trampoline, it henceforth became the focal point of backyard activity, and that activity consisted of up to six kids jumping and screaming for hours on end while the dogs barked at them from the ground below. In the summer months, a water hose was added into the mix, which only raised the din of their existential shrieks. Eventually, we made the observation that none of the kids appeared to be growing or aging, that they seemed to be stuck in time or stricken with a curse, and henceforth they were known as the Vampire Children.

Rather than take it out on the kids, we mostly took a grin-and-bear-it approach to their incessant audible presence. Devoting significant time and energy to the issue felt like a lost cause anyway; the one direct attempt we had made years ago to address the barking dogs had only solved the problem for an afternoon or so, and given the parents’ visible indifference to their spawn, it’s safe to say they cared even less about the well-being of their neighbors. But when the pandemic hit, and background problems like problem neighbors hit center stage, it was evident that something needed to be done for the sake of our work-from-home sanity.

Initially, that something was calling around for estimates on privacy fences. A few companies came over to take measurements and give us quotes, and we even talked to our surrounding neighbors – including the Head Vampire – about sharing the costs. But after Beer Gut Nosferatu revealed that they were planning on putting in a privacy fence of their own in the fall, we tabled our plans and soon pivoted to a cross-country move – a move that, while not directly influenced by their presence, was absolutely partially influenced by our proximity to the Vampire Children.

On the morning of June 30, two days after the open house and a smattering of Monday showings, as we waited impatiently for that elusive first offer, Erica had an epiphany: The Vampire Children had been outside during most of the showings, and we had literally left the driveway on Monday to the sound of their eternal water-hose-trampoline game. The next day while I was at work, Erica texted me a photo of the chain-link fence from our living room window. Now, when it comes to our relationship, you can usually count on me to be the one who takes mouth-frothing action when exterior forces force my hand, but in this case, it was Erica who took the raging bull of her emotions by the horns, and it was a thing of magnificent beauty. I had to enlarge the photo to see what I was looking at, and upon zooming in, I saw that Erica had gone to a home improvement store, purchased a cheap roll of 6-foot-high bamboo fencing and zip-tied it to the chain-link, thus hiding the Vampire Children from view. After all the repairs and all the money we had spent getting our house ready to sell, after all the prospective buyers – more than 50 of them – had walked through our house over the longest five days of our lives, a $25 roll of bamboo proved to be the sprinkling of pixie dust we needed.

Shortly after midnight on July 1 – our daughter Magnolia’s 12th birthday – Andrea emailed us with news of our first offer. One counter-offer and half a day later, we had a contract in hand before we lit the cake.

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