What We Do During Home Showings

Since we put our house on the market almost 3 weeks ago, we’ve had 20 showings! We’re trying to be thankful for that, even though we haven’t had a good offer come through yet.

We’ve had to get rather creative in finding things to do during all those home showings (since we have to be out of the house.) We’ve averaged more than one per day, which makes keeping up with school and having any semblance of a “normal routine” quite challenging. What makes this even more difficult is having a dog. We can’t leave him home by himself during showings, so we have to take him wherever we go. That tremendously narrows our choices! We’ve jokingly said that we feel homeless. We have a home but we can’t really use it! J

 

During our first home showing—on a Sunday afternoon—we packed up the dog and went to a local park where we hiked the trails for an hour or two. During the week days, we go to another park in town that has a playground and small paved loop. We older kids sit in the car and do school work while Josiah plays on the playground and one person walks the dog around the loop.

It seems that over half of our showings fall around some meal time. This means we’ve had to eat out a lot lately. We do enjoy it, but it can get a bit old after awhile. Two Fridays we had showings during the dinner hour. One week we went to a pizza buffet in town. (The dog happened to be in the kennel that weekend, so he wasn’t a problem.) Last week we went out and ran a few errands. We threw some frozen pizza in the oven as soon as we got home.

One Saturday morning we had an early showing, so we went out to our favorite bagel shop in town. (Again, the dog was in the kennel; otherwise that wouldn’t have worked!)

That same day, we went to a going-away party some friends threw for us while another showing went on at home.

Another weeknight, we had plans to go out to dinner as a family to celebrate all of the goings-on. But we also needed to drop off some donations at our church. We had a showing scheduled, and the logistics just wouldn’t work out right with the dog. Mom quickly ran him to the kennel for the night, and we continued on to church and then dinner at our favorite Mexican restaurant.

Roma and me at the Mexican restaurant.

Two beautiful Senoritas.

Daddy and Mommy.

One night this week, we girls had dance class during a showing. Ben and the dog went over to a neighbor’s house. We are so thankful for all the grace our neighbors have given us during this difficult time of selling our house! One of our neighbors came over yesterday morning with our mail from the day before. There had been so many cars blocking the mailbox during a showing, that the mail lady left our mail with our neighbor.

 

We’ve also run errands during showings. One person usually stays in the car with the dog while the others go inside. We went to the pet store earlier this week where Mikey was able to get out. It was a good training opportunity. J

 

We really hope that we’ll get a good offer on our house this week, but if not, we’ll continue to find new places to go during showings! If you have any suggestions, please leave them in the comments! J