the inspection for our sale of park was tuesday, and by the end of the day some of the sparkle had started coming off of the prospective buyers for our place on park road.

i should start by saying that we we’re a little cranky to start.

part of their original offer to buy our place was “complete flexibility” for our settlement and move out — they were living somewhere month to month, and just needed to give 30 days notice. however, by the time the contract came, that had been revised down to “no flexibility what-so-ever” and we had to move out the same day as we settled on Monroe, which is a logistical nightmare.

(in the end, we negotiated a scant 7 day rent back, but thankfully it’s all we needed.)

as a result, we decided to be a little more proactive with their inspection of our place — we tried to gave them a bunch of information on our place up front, in an effort to make sure they got everything they needed out of their morning kicking our tires.

unfortunately, they still couldn’t find our water heater — even though we had done everything short of drawing them a map based on our own journey of water heater discovery.

they gave us a provisional list of issues they wanted addressed — including two that to this day i have no clue what is broken (and neither of those are the one where they want something “adjustmented”):

• tiles near the base of the washer dryer to be regrouted.
• gaps in the floor of the utility clause to be closed.
• closet doors in both bedrooms to be adjustmented to close fully.
• bathroom light to be replaced with wet area rated fixture.
• high loop for dishwasher to be adjusted.

(we opted to give them $500 to fix the stuff themselves.)

as for the “missing” water heater, they asked to extend the inspection another five days — just long enough to put our purchase of Monroe in jeopardy. instead, we gave them a day extension, and Brandon suggested that I be there the next morning to talk them the place everything myself.

what followed was a lesson in the power of eye contact — as it turned out that they were legitimately nice people, doing exactly the same sort of thing the lady sparkler and i would have done.

mr. firsttimehomebuyer was detail oriented and focused on making a great investment decision (not unlike my own beloved). mrs. firsttimehomebuyer was a neo-hippie (much like myself) who was excited primarily about the community and the neighborhood.

we talked about our place, the building and the neighborhood — and in the course of 20 minutes they went from inexperienced ogres who we’re screwing up the purchase of our dream home to people we’d totally have over for dinner.

if the lesson of the last two weeks to our real estate agent is to take all his places off the market to make them sell quicker, the lesson for us is to meet any prospective buyers ourselves and take them out for drinks.