Hiding the memories
Nothing will force you to take a good look at your stuff like being told to hide it all away. I know this because I was up until 3 this morning jamming all of it into closets.
This step in the home-selling process is new to me. I’ve sold houses before, but can’t recall a real estate agent ever having the talk with me – the one that goes like this.
“Take everything off every horizontal surface,” she said. “All that stuff over there,” she said motioning to a narrow table under the window where the plants live, “all of that has to go.”
The photographer is coming today to take the photos that will go with the listing for my house sale. The commission I’ll pay comes with 360-degree photos that give panoramic views of every room.
“Can we leave the basement out of this?” I asked, knowing the room down there is where most of my stuff will have to hide.
For five hours, I scampered around, ridding each room of any sign that an actual person lives here. I’ve never been a knick-knack person, but I am a book person.
“Thin the herd there,” the Realtor said. I culled the shelves the way I used to thin the corn rows at the farm where I worked during college. Cut every third one. I filled a heavy plastic bin with books; it was so heavy I had to push it out of the room.
Gone went the framed photos, the carved and painted wooden zebra from the windowsill over the sink. I banished the teetering stack of folders from my desk and slid it under the daybed. The wall to the right of my desk is where I’d taped funny photos of my kids. I pulled them all down. Off went the toaster, the blender, the radio, the sugar bowl and tiny framed photo of my grandparents sitting on an overturned rowboat. The wooden clock my son made for me in middle-school industrial arts class.
You live with and among these things every day and they become part of the background sounds of life. The hiding-away forced me to touch and hold some objects for the first time since I moved here, and they were dusty.
The goal is to remove my personality from the house, so that potential buyers will project their own lives into those rooms. When the Realtor pointed to the stack of sheet music on the floor by the piano, I felt almost defensive. She only meant I should move it, but still.
A lifetime and three houses ago, I hosted a party. An elegant friend with very good taste came to help me set things up. She walked into the living room and grabbed a lamp from a side table, handed it to me and told me to stash it away. I liked that lamp, and took its rejection personally. As I packed away my personality last night, I wondered what that friend might say about all of it.
What an emotional thing, house-selling. For going on five years, this house held the very essence of me; I filled it with my voice, my happy and sad, and my kids and dog and friends. My books and plants and those towering stacks of folders that hold notes from all my documentaries. Funny how scrubbing it clean of my stuff will make it more appealing to strangers.
After all that work, my house looks weirdly stripped down and denuded. My Realtor said it will sell, but only if the buyers can imagine themselves here. And not me.
Beth Dolinar can be reached at cootiej@aol.com/.