Previously I talked about some of the problems of selling a house with pets, and the difficulty we had getting them out of the picture (literally), but lately we’ve experienced some other snags.
Evacuating the House
Murph is a 65 pound bluetick coonhound with a deep, loud bark. He’s shy of men, but is generally friendly towards women and children. He’s never showed signs of aggression towards a human, but many people are afraid of him, mainly due to his size.
We don’t want to take any chances –-either scaring away potential buyers or having someone either intentionally or unintentionally antagonize Murph into biting them– so we decided early on showings would be made by appointment and when we left the house we’d take Murph with us.
We did this two years ago when we moved from Jacksonville, too. It worked out fine.
It’s working again now, save for a little snag we hit this past Sunday.
Drought to Flood
We either seem to have days without any showings, or days chalk full of them. Sunday happened to be the latter.
At two o’clock in the afternoon the appointment center called saying there was an agent interested in showing the house from 3:30 to 4:30. Fine.
So Murph and I left and headed for his favorite park, Crockett. While we were there the appointment center called my cell phone and said we had another agent interested in seeing the house from 4:30 to 5. Okay. I changed my plans and decided to take Murph shopping to PetSmart. (It was just too hot to stay in the park, even if we were keeping to the shady paths. And I feel bad cooping Murph up in the car –-running with the A/C cranked of course—- just sitting around. Boring for the both of us.)
But en route to PetSmart we got another call. Yep, another showing, from 5:30 to 6:30. UGH!
Dogging the Heat
We understand we can’t sell it if we don’t show it, but it’s somewhat challenging to find places to go with a dog in the heat of the summer to keep cool. If we had human kids we’d just go to the pool, a movie, a museum or something, but other than PetSmart there’s not too many places I can hang out inside with my pooch on a Sunday afternoon. (Or any afternoon for that matter.)
However, maybe I’m just not being creative enough. If you have been through this yourself or have any suggestions, I’d love to hear them!