RIFLES AT DAWN

THE GREAT ADVENTURE, Part One: SELLING THE COMPOUND

We knew, when we bought the house in 1998, that the day would come when we’d sell it. We raised a family in that house. Five pets lived with us throughout the years – three dogs and two cats, not counting three years of hosting the guest cat – our son and daughter-in-law’s devil kitty, Zelda – while our son spent three years overseas as an international auditor for the firm that employed him.

We celebrated birthdays, high school graduations, college graduations, and anniversaries in the home which we dubbed “The Morrissey Compound.” (OK, I gave it that name, but it stuck. The genesis of the nickname is a story for another day, and, not surprisingly, it involves alcohol.) We had lots of family gatherings, parties, and get-togethers with friends at the Compound. My wife and I spent a lot of memorable evenings lounging in the hot tub on the upper-level deck off the master suite. We loved our beautiful home.

Now, it’s someone else’s house, and my bride and I have decamped to a “luxury apartment” in Bridgeport, Connecticut, eight blocks from the ocean. Well, Long Island Sound, to be exact.

For a long span, from 2009 until 2018, the Compound was also my workplace. I built a radio studio in my huge office space and did news reports for a national online news service for 9 of those 10 years. Like many others, I stitched together a combination of gigs to keep the money rolling in, and served my clients with writing and editing services, voicing news reports, and managing social media. On the last day of September, 2018, I allowed my last contract expire, and I pulled the plug on work.

As anyone who’s lived long enough can tell you, things don’t always work out the way you’ve planned. My bride planned to retire on her 65^th birthday, in July of 2019, and she did. Our daughter plotted and schemed with her mother to lure us to coastal Connecticut after our retirement, so she could keep an eye on us in our “old age.”

With that in mind, we figured the sale of the Compound and move to the east coast would happen probably in the summer of 2022. How did we arrive at that estimation? It was loosely based on what we thought would be the life span of our younger collie.

In 2006, after our faithful Sheltie crossed the rainbow bridge, we got a purebred collie puppy which I named “Shadow.” She turned out to be the best dog ever. Smart, energetic, obedient, loyal and loving, Shadow patrolled the vast expanse of the back yard at the Compound, keeping the squirrels, deer, and wild turkeys at bay.

In 2010, we got Shadow a companion: another purebred collie, which my wife named Sunny (see what she did there? Shadow – and Sunny).

In the picture above, Sunny is on the left and Shadow is on the right. The two were best friends, inseparable, literally living their lives shoulder-to-shoulder. Shadow passed away three days after New Year’s Day 2019, having lived a full and wonderful life. Since Sunny was two years Shadow’s junior, we figured she’d have a similar lifespan and would likely be with us until late 2021 or early 2022.

We wanted Sunny, who had never slept a night anywhere other than at the Compound since the day we brought her home, to live out her days with us, free to roam the expansive back yard and end her days at the Compound.

But that was not to be.

Scant weeks after Shadow passed on, Sunny fell victim to an extremely aggressive form of pancreatic cancer, and she drew her last breath literally at my feet in the living room of the Compound in early February, 2019.

At this time, my bride was fewer than six months from joining me in retirement, and suddenly our retirement plans changed. With Sunny gone, there was no longer a reason for us to keep living in the spacious home we’d owned for 20 years. We adjusted the timetable and decided to sell the home and move east in the spring of 2020.

After my wife’s retirement party on August 1, we set about preparing the Compound for sale in the spring market. We hired tradesmen to spruce things up, to put a fresh coat of paint on all the interior walls, to replace many of the fixtures to give the Compound a more modern feel. We replaced the entire kitchen and dining room floor. We donated tons of furniture we wouldn’t need after the move to Habitat for Humanity. We had electricians come in and make sure everything was code-correct. We spent 25 grand bringing everything up to snuff. Or so we thought.

The place looked good; almost like new. In November, we hired the realtor who’d sold our neighbor’s home the prior summer and had earned rave reviews from our erstwhile neighbors. We thought maybe we’d put the home up for sale in April, but his advice – which turned out to be prescient – was to list it for sale ASAP, which turned out to be the first week of March.

He advised us to price the home at the low end of the spectrum to create a bidding war, and that’s exactly what happened. Within 48 hours we had five offers – all substantially above asking price. We countered what we considered the best three of the five offers. All three came back with an even higher bid. We accepted an offer that was three thousand dollars below the highest offer. That was because this particular offer contained two of the most powerful words in real estate: ALL CASH. On March 6^th the deal, for all intents and purposes, was done.

And then the plague hit.

Suddenly, restaurants and bars were closed. We were told to shelter in place. And suddenly, our ALL CASH buyer had a lot more leverage. Real estate sales fell through the cellar. The father of our buyer is a real estate agent in Chicago, and he went to work on us with a chain saw. He hired the most picky inspector in the world. After the inspection report, it was a litany of “replace this, repair that, fix this thing, fix that thing”. The cost of this unnecessary repair/replace BS was twenty thousand dollars. On top of the 25 grand we'd already spent.

Our realtor said, in essence, bend over. He told us if we didn’t acquiesce to this jerk’s unreasonable demand, daddy – the man with the money - would tell his son to back out of the offer and it might take as long as a year to find another buyer, at a lower price, because of the horribly unfair inspection and the ever-worsening pandemic.

What had been an easy, quick sale had become a nightmare. We clenched our jaws, took the additional 20-thousand-dollar hit, and moved on with our lives. The close was on May 6^th, a week after we’d left Madison for good. We signed the papers in front of a notary in our hotel on May 5^th and the money was in the bank on May 7^th. The nightmare was finally over.

For months, we thought we’d cry like babies when we pulled out of the driveway at the Compound for the last time. We feared the many wonderful memories we’d made there with our children and pets would cascade through our minds and we’d be sobbing. 

But, at the end, at high noon on April 28^th, after the moving van was packed and headed east and we’d done the final walk-through to make sure nothing we wanted was left behind, we loaded our suitcases into our car, rolled slowly down the driveway, and stopped in front of the house.

Neither of us was crying. My wife took a photo with her iPhone, posted it to Facebook with the caption “Bye, old friend. We’re off to Connecticut.”

I hit the gas and we headed east.

(To be continued in the next post, coming soon, titled “Road Trip.”)