Home sweet swap: Seattle/Ann Arbor house exchange leads to cultural immersion
Selling a home in America these days isn’t easy, but movers and sellers in Seattle and Ann Arbor are making trades to solve that problem.Excerpt:As I pulled my overloaded Subaru up to a house in Ann Arbor, Mich., last September, I paused a moment with an unsettling realization.Inside the home — a lovely two-story brick colonial on a quintessentially leafy street — was a couple I’d met just once before, for an hour. Based on that meeting, a few e-mails and a one-page agreement, we’d arranged to swap houses for the next nine months while I studied at the University of Michigan and they took an extended vacation in Seattle.The what-ifs, I realized, were daunting. The Ann Arbor couple — Hans and Chris — seemed ideal house-swappers. But what if they weren’t? What if Hans and Chris hated our house and wanted to come home? Or, more plausibly, what if my young children wreak the kind of havoc that I know they can?Read the rest of the story here.
Selling a home in America these days isn’t easy, but movers and sellers in Seattle and Ann Arbor are making trades to solve that problem.
Excerpt:
As I pulled my overloaded Subaru up to a house in Ann Arbor, Mich., last September, I paused a moment with an unsettling realization.
Inside the home — a lovely two-story brick colonial on a quintessentially leafy street — was a couple I’d met just once before, for an hour. Based on that meeting, a few e-mails and a one-page agreement, we’d arranged to swap houses for the next nine months while I studied at the University of Michigan and they took an extended vacation in Seattle.
The what-ifs, I realized, were daunting. The Ann Arbor couple — Hans and Chris — seemed ideal house-swappers. But what if they weren’t? What if Hans and Chris hated our house and wanted to come home? Or, more plausibly, what if my young children wreak the kind of havoc that I know they can?
Read the rest of the story here.
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