What's Wrong with My House?
The other night when my beloved put the little angel to bed, I watched three episodes of Sell Your House on HDTV. This is a scary show to watch, especially when you're thinking of selling your own house.
Some of you may recall the last time we tried to sell This Old House. It was an unsuccessful attempt fraught with horror. We are planning to sell This Old House next spring, so I have begun reading books such as Selling Your Own House Without a Broker For Dummies and the like. After seeing our real estate agent do a Jack Shit job of selling our house the last time, we decided we'd learned enough about the process to take it on ourselves for our next trick. Also, we live in one of those "on the edge of a cool neighborhood but not exactly IN a cool neighborhood" neighborhoods that first-time home buyers troll in their cars every spring.
But I digress. After watching a couple in a disgusting house turn it into high-dollar splendor by rearranging their furniture and reglazing a bathtub, I began to feel inspired. I also began really looking at This Old House. Hmm. It's pretty scary to look at your own house through the eyes of someone else. Might they notice the chunks out of the living-room walls that seem to scream "Hi, a ten-year-old boy once threw a baseball repeatedly against me?" Might they notice the large hole in the kitchen linoleum where the dishwasher poured forth its sudsy goodness like the parting of the Red Sea? Might they notice the wool rug that looks like its been chewed by rats? Might they notice the picture rail we installed all by ourselves before we learned of the wonders of a miter saw?
There are some improvements I'd like to make before we try to sell it again, and certainly we'll have to remove the 4,567,342 small toys, shoes, books and child accouterments that litter the house. That whole bathtub-reglazing thing might do wonders for our gray, chipped tub. Replacing light fixtures is the house equivalent of a boob job. My beloved walked out of our oddly shaped bedroom the other day, tripped over the decrepit Berber and declared, "We are finally wallowing in our white-trashiness." I won't replace the carpet, though. There's hardwood under them snags. Let some other eager homeowner discover the wonders of refinishing wood floors that we lived through in 2001 downstairs.
Still, the show, it plagues me. For every bit of warm wood detailing I see, I note where I didn't quite achieve a perfect trim-job on the half-bath paint or the patched spot on the kitchen ceiling where my beloved actually fell through while replacing the floor joists up above. Our house is much like our life - we didn't really get the details right the first time we tried. If we didn't, though, the new owners wouldn't have the fun that we did wondering what brand of moron the old owners were. And hell if I want to deny them that pleasure.
