Joe Celentano, a dear old friend of mine, became a real estate agent in Connecticut many years ago after a long career in the restaurant industry.  He’d had enough of that – the hassle, the expense, the 24/7 worry.  Real estate is not without worry, of course, but the reward he feels when he helps a family find a home they love is worth it for him.

If I hadn’t stumbled into a relationship with an agent here in Los [...]

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(If I saved every realtor notepad I have been given, I would never need one more sheet of paper. Ever.)

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Last week I told you how I was about to go house hunting for the first time.  We only had about an hour, so Myrna the Realtor had a short list of four houses for us to see.  “They’re a bit out of your price range,” she warned me, “but I want you to get a sense of the neighborhoods that are in these school districts you’re interested in.”

I had checked out two of the properties in the MLS listings [...]

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One thing that always confused me when thinking about home selling/buying was the overlapping nature of the job.  How do you buy a house if you haven’t sold the one you live in?  How do you sell your house if you haven’t already lined up one to buy?

It is that worry that made me hesitate to start looking at homes with Myrna.  We met her several months ago, and our first date to go out and physically look at listings [...]

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When I was pregnant with my first son and nearing the month of his birth in 2005, my nesting instinct took the form of a remodeling tornado.  I painted all three of our bedrooms and our hallway, had new carpet installed, had the heating/cooling system replaced, had copper repiping of our plumbing system done, and ordered my husband to paint every interior door.  A few years later as we expected the birth of our second son, my husband remodeled the [...]

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That’s what my husband, Stewart, says every time we go on vacation, anywhere.  It’s his pie-in-the-sky dream of owning land in a desirable vacation spot to possibly sell or even on which to build a home.  Usually I laugh, dream about it too for a minute, and then I just forget about it.

But I just went to Honolulu for a quick solo trip, and there I met the reigning queen of social media and cheerfulness, Kelly Mitchell.  She is [...]

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In tackling the very grown-up and serious tasks of selling and buying a house for the first time, the first term that made me panic was “pre-approval letter,” because I simply had no idea what it meant. When I heard it I was nowhere near a computer and still didn’t have an iPhone, so I couldn’t look it up on the internet, which is my first instinct in that kind of situation. Thank goodness for the internet, because [...]

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We’ve decided to move.  So now what?

As soon my husband and I opened our minds to the possibility of moving, I was flooded with Overwhelm.  No, that’s not a perfume or a superhero or a celebrity’s baby’s name (although it’s not a bad idea).  It’s that feeling that comes over you when you have no.  Idea.  What you.  Are doing.

Our main goal is to relocate to a neighborhood in which our children would be guaranteed enrollment in a “good school.”  [...]

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Introducing “Diary Of A Madwoman Overwhelmed Mom Exasperated Mom Moving Mom”

Holy crap, we’re moving.

That was my first thought after my husband and I had a conversation that started out as a rhetorical discussion about where our two boys would sleep once the 2-year-old is ready to move out of his crib into a big-boy bed.  We own a three-bedroom house in the San Fernando Valley area of Los Angeles, and the “baby” shares a room with the guest bed.  So [...]

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