Our tulip tree makes these outrageously sensuous flowers. However, they are verrrry delicate in the wind and rain.

(And for all the non-English English speakers like me, “metal” in this post’s title means “gravel”, which is something that had me perplexed for a long time…)

Yesterday we made what will probably be our last visit to our old house.

They say go lightly in the world, leave only footprints. And mostly we do. And mostly it’s right.

But it’s still a little sad seeing the place so empty of us, with only the imprints of furniture feet left…

We bought our new house before selling the old one. There were a couple of reasons for that. First, we felt some time pressure on the new one… if we had had to make our offer contingent on sale we likely wouldn’t have been successful. Second, we wanted to paint and stage our house for maximum impact, because we were afraid that in a crowded market we might get overlooked.

So, we took out a bridge loan for essentially the entire purchase price, giving us five months to either pay it off or refinance. A potentially expensive option, especially if the house didn’t sell.

After a 4-week campaign of open houses and online ads and so on, we were lot 5 of 6 at yesterday’s auction. We didn’t know until the last second whether there would be any bidders, but in the end there were two. That’s really good, because the competition really does jack up the price.

During the actual bidding, the $$ didn’t quite reach the reserve price. At that point, the auctioneer takes the leading bidder into the back room and gently puts his hands around their throat while looking deep into their eyes, purring and hissing and spraying pheromones out of a special deal-closing gland. Another $100k magically appears.

Sold.

It’s a big relief for us, because I’m still unemployed and so refinancing might have been tricky.

And as a bonus, I got to meet this guy, Shane Cortese, who was in a bunch of NZ TV shows maybe 10-20 years ago that we watched on DVD when we first got here. He was part of a revolving group of people who produced what I thought was a really good body of work. He gave Hollywood a try, and ended up back here doing these auctions. I remember seeing the announcement of his career change in the paper.