When we last left our intrepid male mover, he was off to the garage to see the things that Caesar doesn’t want and should be rendered onto Caesar’s recycle bin. Not much, as it turns out. But other challenges were afoot.
It seems today that you can’t sell your house, your lovely home, with your lovely objets d’art and prints of Elvis and have your lovely objets d’art and prints of Elvis on display.
We knew the routine in general but not to the extent of the militant stager. Looking back, it must have been difficult for her to even enter our place. Any one can read lips that clearly enunciate the unbelievable, ‘Oh my God!’
I was hoping for an executive summary: ‘Make it neutral; make it light; make it roomy.’ And then leave.
I wasn’t ready for:
‘ Change the wallpaper.’
‘ Hide the piano.’
‘ Move that piece of someone’s mid-century furniture.’
‘ Paint that room.’
‘And why is it so dark in here?’
‘Well’, I muttered (sotto voce) in defense of the last observation, ‘for a start, it’s fall, overcast, late in the day, there are curtains on the windows so the neighbours won’t see us running after each other naked, the army surplus store was out of searchlights and this custom home used real wood instead of drywall.’
And that’s just the first room she’d entered.
Now that she’d thrown realistic expectations out the stained glass window (‘Can they be removed?’) I started punching back.
‘I was thinking of going modern and covering the natural exotic wood flooring in the dining room with used shag carpeting in a sort of calming, off-colourish shade.’ Followed by, ‘and adding some joie-de-vivre to the living room with an Andy Warhol Cambell’s mushroom soup can unsigned print propped by the fireplace,’ all this presented with a designer’s pseudo-studious pose of one arm horizontally supporting the elbow of the other that lightly fingers the cheek.
OK, so maybe the puce throw should be thrown out and, granted, the oil painting of uncle Egbert in full battle regalia (Boer War) over the mantle could be retired but it was the minutiae I wasn’t ready for, ‘And take down the knife rack.’
Pause with me, dear reader, as I try to paint a picture where a knife rack in a kitchen kills the deal.
‘Well, we love the place, well maintained, right size, separate drive, double car detached garage, beautiful fully landscaped back yard, all the latest mod cons, air-conditioned, so close to good shopping and fabulous schools, good services, parks, low taxes, quiet and neighbours our age with cars we recognize. We’re prepared to put in a bully bid and meet all your conditions … wait a minute … is that what I think it is? Let me get a closer look. ‘There’s a knife rack in the kitchen!’ Herbert, grab your shoes, don’t bother to put them on, we’re outta here.’
As an aside, I was tempted to add a warning label to the knife rack: may contain asbestos and/or knob-and-tube wiring.
So we give lip service to the stager’s recommendations: push around the clutter, hide this and that to some unremembered spot, haul grandma’s beloved and well used bench to the garage, vacuum, chase cobwebs, only use one toilet, remove the curtains, stop running after each other naked, eat standing up, unload our accumulated no-resale-value crap to Value Village (False advertising?) and polish the knife rack to an all time lustre all in time for the photographer.
This house could now be used to promote a third world country’s fund-raising drive to eliminate austerity. Each room is bare of any sign of life, any sign of taste (good or bad), any sign that humans had once graced this space in the last hundred years. And to illuminate this wasteland in all its God forsaken lack of glory, the photographer insists, ‘Turn on all the lights.’
The photographer politely reserves judgement as he clicks from room to room; he knows the pictures go for retouching plus he has liability insurance.
So now we await the glossies displayed on the real estate agent’s web-site and expect to wonder how the place we inhabited these past 40 years looks so unrecognizable.
But this frozen-in-time tundra doesn’t now go away. There’s a least a week of not finding anything. First there’s the agents’ open house; then (hopefully) the prospective buyers’ positive analysis. Until you agree to what the market wills, you’re conditioned to forever hanging your keys on the just-removed key rack and then picking them up off the floor.
But selling is the name of the game. If a strategically placed bowl of highly polished granny smiths on a never-before spotless, clutter-free kitchen counter gets a heart to flutter who am I to claim, ‘Fake news!’
How’d we do after all this? (To be continued)