A Lesson In: Perfectionism and External Control
We can laugh about it now...
We sold our cabin.
It was a new, bittersweet experience.
We loved it there, but we also knew it wasn’t our future anymore.
In order to prepare for potential showings when we first listed our house, we spent an entire week decluttering, selling things, and making many trips to take the trash out.
If you know my husband, then you know he’s… kinda a clean freak. He’s definitely the tidier out of the two of us.
So of course when we clean the house it can get pretty meticulous.
“Go get a magic eraser and start scrubbing marks off the wall” type of meticulous.
We went to great lengths to make the house look as presentable as could be for our first showing to potential buyers.
We tidied up in the morning. Scrubbed off scuff marks on the walls. Vacuumed the stairs. Dusted cobwebs off on the outside patio. Then we left for a day out so the buyers could come to see the house.
A few hours later, the realtor texts us after the showing and tells us the showing is over, they’re off the property, and they loved the place.
“Great, sounds like the first showing went well!”, we think to ourselves.
Even if these aren’t our buyers, we’re feeling hopeful about this sale. But maybe these are the buyers.
The house couldn’t have been cleaner or more put together.
An Unexpected Visitor
We get home.
A foreign feeling comes over me from strangers just walking through our house and life.
It’s fascinating to think about the stranger you envision just based on their belongings in their home.
I’m unloading the groceries. Cody’s turning on the sauna in the garage and all of a sudden I hear a loud “WTF?!”
The first thoughts that come to mind are, what’d the visitors mess up?! What’s out of place? What did we miss?
Jump scare.
Something we couldn’t have anticipated.
A 2-foot garden snake.
Coiled up, stuck onto a sticky mouse trap.
Right in front of our refrigerator in our garage.
NEVER before had we seen a snake in our neighborhood, let alone one in our house!!! And on the day of our first showing! 🤦♀️😬
COOL!
Immediate cringe and embarrassment come over us.
“Did the buyers see that?! Where did that come from? Why today?!” 😫
We’ll never know at what point that snake came out.
The only way we could think of how this happened was that the mouse trap was under the fridge in the garage. The snake must have found his way to it, got stuck, and was able to move enough just to get himself out from under the fridge to be in plain sight sitting out in the garage.
But, 10 minutes later we were laughing. Joking about how “what can go wrong will go wrong”.
The Life Lesson
You can do everything in YOUR power to control your space, control your environment, control a situation. And out from left field, something we’d never expect, something we never imagined, happens.
And it just goes to show, no matter how much you try to perfect something… Make it justttt right… Something external could come and change that.
This was a similar learning lesson I had during Covid. You can plan a wedding, plan all these trips, plan your life, try to control your situation as much as possible, and something completely external and unexpected comes and disrupts your vision.
Covid was also the reason we bought the cabin in the first place, but, I digress.
In this situation, honestly, if the buyers did see our slithery friend and couldn’t handle a little reptilian, then maybe staying in the woods an hour from the nearest grocery store might not be for them.
And that’s okay.
For whatever reason, that was supposed to happen that day.
They weren’t our buyers and over the next few days, the perfect couple made us an offer.
And it just makes for a funny story and something to laugh about now.