July has been an odd month around here. My eggplants aren’t growing (like, not at all since they were put in the ground), the biggest crop of mosquitoes in twenty years has hatched (yet I’ve escaped with nary a bite!), and a week or so ago I got a phone call out of the blue from someone who worked at a real estate office asking if I knew anyone in our neighborhood who was thinking of selling their house. Apparently, the housing stock in my quite desirable neighborhood is very low. Rather than wait for clients, this realtor was taking the initiative to find them.

It so happens I don’t know anyone who is wanting to sell. “What about you?” the man asked.

Well…

The truth of the matter is that we had a realtor give us an assessment two or three years ago that did not turn out terribly favorable. We bought our house in November 2005. When a realtor hears that, she gets a pained look on her face and says, “Ooo…” Lansing real estate hasn’t recovered as well or as quickly as some other cities and the comparables in our area (which seemed to be all she considered) didn’t allow her to get us a price point we could work with. So we figured we’d be here for the foreseeable future. Not that that’s bad. We love our house. Everyone loves our house. People walk in the door and they are compelled to comment on how cute or adorable or classy our house is.

But when we bought our house, we weren’t planning on having a child. The boy will soon outgrow his small bedroom, we live near a very busy street, and we live in the worst school system in the area. His particular elementary school is one of the best, but come to find out he can only go there through third grade as the school is being completely converted over to Chinese immersion and the contemporary students will go…I don’t know where. We had thought we could stay here until the boy was a sixth grader (despite the size of his bedroom). In June we found this was not the case and began fretting about what to do next.

Enter this random (or was it?) phone call.

Sure we would be disappointed by what this new realtor would say, we met and talked about the house. Unlike the previous realtor, this new guy took into consideration the substantial improvements we’ve made over a decade in our home — the new thirty-year roof, the renovated bathroom, the incredible landscaping, etc. And when he came back with the numbers we were pleasantly surprised. His recommended sale price was a full $20,000 higher than the old realtor’s recommendation a few years ago. Suddenly, moving to a different school system was a real option. We decided we will likely put the house on the market in the late spring next year.

And you know what that means: ten months of purging, cleaning, touching up paint, and getting every room ready to show well. It means getting rid of crap that has accumulated over a decade of living in one place. It means my recycling bin will be full every time it is put on the curb. It means lots of lists and projects and weekends with mom over helping me scrub and sort and sell. (My mother once moved house five times in less than four years, by herself, with two children under five. She is an expert.) I’ve already begun to ruthlessly go through my file drawers and bookshelves and magazines, and I have a detailed plan worked out to tackle every inch of the house over the coming months.

I’m not sure exactly which community around here we’ll end up in, but after ten years in one place — the longest I’ve lived somewhere since my childhood home on Lesperance Court — I’m excited about the prospect of finding the right house for our family of three in a great school system for our son. It will be difficult to leave such a beautiful home and yard, but a new place will be like a new canvas on which to design another beautiful home and yard, armed with the knowledge and experience we’ve gleaned from the past decade.

So beyond the usual fare of articles about writing and Michigan and pretty pictures, for the next year or so this space will be a place for me to share with you the odyssey of moving house.