A kind of love or madness

I've discovered I don't like selling a house as much as buying a new one.  Buying is a fun outing; you go on a date with a house and check out the views, the land, the kitchen and imagine what life would be like if you were living there.  It's probably the only kind of first date where the meeting ends in either a proposal or a dumping.  But that's the real estate world.  We make the most expensive purchase we're ever going to make based on a 20 minute walk-through (or two or three) and some good inspection reports. Buy a car (easily 10 times cheaper than a house) and you peruse websites and go on test drives for months before making a decision.  It's silly, how quickly we choose our homes.  But I digress.

This won't sell....

If buying a house is a fun outing, then selling, on the other hand, is kind of a forced death march, even if you're anxious to sell it and move on with your life.  If you want your potential homebuyers to be able to envision themselves living in your home, it has to look not only immaculate, but also wiped fairly clean of your own family's individual tastes and quirks.  As "vanilla" as possible, is what I've heard.  

as well as this will.

Before putting the house on the market, for instance, I had to remove my totally awesome hot sauce collection from its space on a kitchen wall, take down numerous things off the plant shelves, and dis-assemble the clothesline outside.  I'll be honest; I hated doing it, because all those things represent me and my family in one way or another.  Yet I understand.  Last weekend we went to see a house where the owners had done absolutely nothing to get their home ready to show.  Papers were littered everywhere, the cat litter boxes were full, and there was dirty laundry strewn about.  I couldn't wait to get out of the house -- it could have been the Taj Mahal and it would have seemed unappetizing due to all the living that appeared to be going on in it.  It smelled of cat piss, too.  Just sayin'.


It's the kind of thing that puts a menopausal woman in the state of mind where she collapses into bed at 8 pm, exhausted, but wakes up at 3 am, thinking of ways to fix that house, or something that needs to be hidden away in this one to make the counters more sparse and therefore appealing.


No sleep, rollercoaster emotions, lots of primping and eyeballing the potential mate to see if they've got what it takes for the long haul.  Yup, it's an awful lot like dating.  


And as of today, we've proposed to one house and shown ours to several.  It's all up in the air at this point, and in my head The Late Zone of the pre-down hours of each new day.