Well, it's coming up on the anniversary of a full year of this blog (in April) during which I have not posted an entry.
Too much has happened in the intervening time to write about. Most bloggers would be thrilled by this wealth of events, given that these are the stuff of which life (and hence, blog entries) are made. I refer, of course, to the three Rs: Remarriage, Retirement and Relocation.
During this embarrassingly long interval of hyperactivity with no literary output, the phenomenon of social networking has taken a stranglehold on the web. Facebook in particular has become as daily an addiction for the generations behind mine as Days of Our Lives is for my own age group (66+). Twitter likewise, is filled with Tweets, or is it Twits? And these are only two components of a whole movement, abetted by the ubiquitous cell phone/camera/movie theatre/game parlor that has become a tool for the upheaval of entire societies and cultures.
To post to a blog requires reflection, introspection and above all, time. Where did all that go?
In the old days (a couple of years or so ago) it would take, at a minimum, ten or fifteen minutes to sit down and write anything on a blog. Even assuming the computer was already running, there was the ritual of having to log onto the blog site, run the editor, type up the entry, proofread it, and then post it (and in many cases, correct it post haste). Blog hosting companies soon adopted the idea of simplifying posting by allowing direct posting from an email message, and now, of course, you can post voice messages directly from your phone.
Other writers have mentioned Attention Deficit Disorder as a symptom of our times: some call it The Demand for Instant Gratification, and the doddering amongst us find Impatience to be a sufficient description of the trend. My generation experienced it mainly on three occasions: Christmas morning, sermons, and the last week of school.
If it is true that humanity is speeding up and becoming more interconnected at the same time, there is a down side to this trend, which has already shown up in, for example, Facebook. Some call it over-sharing. There's TMI (too much information). The stretching of privacy boundaries until they snap. The arbitrary changing of corporate policy or rules while the game is on. The inattention to craftsmanship and detail. The elevation of the trivial to the consequential.
Along with the ratcheting up of the pace and triviality of mass communication (and to think that most of this junk is now stored and indexed and retrievable), comes an overwhelming need to limit intake and filter content. It gives me pause to think about the hours of my life that I have irretrievably wasted on reading comments that follow even a New York Times piece, or a home improvement site. It becomes an addiction, like gold mining: panning the muck for that valuable gem of insight or information that can instruct me, enrich my experience, or save me effort, when the odds against success are those of a Reno blackjack table. Even the search engines are swamped.
When I ponder my tendency to waste these hours (which are now more available, given that I finally smartened up and retired), I conclude that I'm as needy for community wisdom as a teenager is for social interaction. The difference is, a younger person has little difficulty in mastering the technology, while I can't seem to hit the mute button on the remote without changing the channel or turning the damn thing off.
I cannot multitask, talk on the phone while watching TV, boil water unless I remain in the kitchen, or converse with an Android. So what are my options? This post started an hour ago. I have only one option: to go from Point A to Point B in a single, straight line, pausing only to deal with spelling, grammar and composition. I suppose that during this interval, a million or more Tweets have flown by , and another 3/4 of a million people have logged onto Facebook.
As I gaze at the Ohio River in flood, a slowly turning raft of sticks, twigs, branches, bottles, tires, styrofoam and plastic revolves just offshore. Occasionally an object will break free from the vortex and rejoin the current, only to become entrapped in the next whirling mass.
The burden of churning flotsam reminds me of social networking.
Sunday, March 6, 2011
Saturday, April 3, 2010
All the world's a stage.
How hard can it be to sell a house?
Very hard.
Lot of work.
The irony, amongst all the patching, painting and purging, is that you're trying to make the house look like nobody ever lived it in. Clean as a whistle. Empty as a tomb yet considerably more inviting. A home, not a house.
I think buyers have been educated by this consumerist society to believe that only the new has desirability. A whole new genre of TV shows based on the principle that we're all unbelievably messy and therefore need professionals to come in and help us get rid of everything that made us comfortable has taken hold on the home improvement channels.
The word is "staging", which is new to anyone trying to sell a house, but has been around professionally for a number of years.
It's all about putting your house on stage. About making it look as though it was perfect. Just like the theatre, it's all a big act. Buyers are invited, as they walk through the door, to suspend their disbelief and be swept up in the superficialities of surfaces.
There's a certain irony in the phrase "real estate". A staged home is neither real, nor, for most of us, is it an "estate". In the case of a resale, it's a place to live, constructed in the past for a different era, for different expectations, and meant to support different lifestyles. Renovation is not far in the future for any resale purchaser.
So the staging becomes a mandatory function to bridge the gap between the reality of this old house and what the prospective buyers think they need, at a minimum, to live conveniently and comfortably and happily ever after, despite the reality that they will move at least once or twice more as they age and their needs change.
Hence, the totally inadequate bathrooms, typically a mere 30 square feet, of a Cape Cod must somehow be made to appear double that size, and the garage, which in most neighborhoods serves the function of a storage unit so full that the car(s) must be left on the driveway, becomes a burden that only a dumpster can solve. And how, we ask, did the people for whom those tiny houses were originally built ever manage with a kitchen that had no dining room or separate pantry, or a bedroom with no walk-in closet or ensuite bathroom?
No building that is more than a few years old can possibly remain wearless and tearless. Nature takes care of that detail by a process called "settling". Techtonic forces are ever at work beneath the foundation, and the effects of weather and wear are discoverable everywhere, the older, the more. It costs more to sell an older house. And what nature doesn't destroy, people and pets do.
Just as the seller hires a stager to dress up the place long enough for the buyer to fall for its cosmetic curb appeal, so the buyer pays for the assurance that there will be no nasty structural surprises. Or perhaps the contract places the burdens of closing on one or the other party. All is done in an effort of the buyer to pay as little as possible, and the seller to get as much as possible for the same piece of property. Yet if you look at any other form of resale transaction, most other personal property (unless you're famous) will net you only garage sale prices.
Oddly enough, there is a way to figure out exactly what a house should be worth. I've never heard of it being done, but since all building costs are known, such as the value of materials and labor, factored by inflation and operational costs (taxes, utilities, depreciation etc.) some such formula should be the basis of a rational calculation. The price should become much more predictable and reasonable and maybe affordable for both parties. Perhaps.
Instead of that, we have to deal with "comparable houses in your district", and how much more reasonably they sold than the price you are demanding. Forget that your house was built of oak by a master Amish carpenter and no nails were used in the construction thereof, the fact remains that it will sell based on the price of whatever else is in your neighborhood, and how pitifully yours compares with theirs.
Location, location, location.
Very hard.
Lot of work.
The irony, amongst all the patching, painting and purging, is that you're trying to make the house look like nobody ever lived it in. Clean as a whistle. Empty as a tomb yet considerably more inviting. A home, not a house.
I think buyers have been educated by this consumerist society to believe that only the new has desirability. A whole new genre of TV shows based on the principle that we're all unbelievably messy and therefore need professionals to come in and help us get rid of everything that made us comfortable has taken hold on the home improvement channels.
The word is "staging", which is new to anyone trying to sell a house, but has been around professionally for a number of years.
It's all about putting your house on stage. About making it look as though it was perfect. Just like the theatre, it's all a big act. Buyers are invited, as they walk through the door, to suspend their disbelief and be swept up in the superficialities of surfaces.
There's a certain irony in the phrase "real estate". A staged home is neither real, nor, for most of us, is it an "estate". In the case of a resale, it's a place to live, constructed in the past for a different era, for different expectations, and meant to support different lifestyles. Renovation is not far in the future for any resale purchaser.
So the staging becomes a mandatory function to bridge the gap between the reality of this old house and what the prospective buyers think they need, at a minimum, to live conveniently and comfortably and happily ever after, despite the reality that they will move at least once or twice more as they age and their needs change.
Hence, the totally inadequate bathrooms, typically a mere 30 square feet, of a Cape Cod must somehow be made to appear double that size, and the garage, which in most neighborhoods serves the function of a storage unit so full that the car(s) must be left on the driveway, becomes a burden that only a dumpster can solve. And how, we ask, did the people for whom those tiny houses were originally built ever manage with a kitchen that had no dining room or separate pantry, or a bedroom with no walk-in closet or ensuite bathroom?
No building that is more than a few years old can possibly remain wearless and tearless. Nature takes care of that detail by a process called "settling". Techtonic forces are ever at work beneath the foundation, and the effects of weather and wear are discoverable everywhere, the older, the more. It costs more to sell an older house. And what nature doesn't destroy, people and pets do.
Just as the seller hires a stager to dress up the place long enough for the buyer to fall for its cosmetic curb appeal, so the buyer pays for the assurance that there will be no nasty structural surprises. Or perhaps the contract places the burdens of closing on one or the other party. All is done in an effort of the buyer to pay as little as possible, and the seller to get as much as possible for the same piece of property. Yet if you look at any other form of resale transaction, most other personal property (unless you're famous) will net you only garage sale prices.
Oddly enough, there is a way to figure out exactly what a house should be worth. I've never heard of it being done, but since all building costs are known, such as the value of materials and labor, factored by inflation and operational costs (taxes, utilities, depreciation etc.) some such formula should be the basis of a rational calculation. The price should become much more predictable and reasonable and maybe affordable for both parties. Perhaps.
Instead of that, we have to deal with "comparable houses in your district", and how much more reasonably they sold than the price you are demanding. Forget that your house was built of oak by a master Amish carpenter and no nails were used in the construction thereof, the fact remains that it will sell based on the price of whatever else is in your neighborhood, and how pitifully yours compares with theirs.
Location, location, location.
Thursday, November 26, 2009
It was only a matter of time
OK. Some mental midget spammed an old entry on this blog (not that I get all that much traffic, but that's fine... quality rather than quantity matters). It was especially galling because it was appended after one of Jo's few entries, and it was anonymous (coward) and it had a whole mess of links to buy cheap software, which you know has to source itself in piracy.
My apologies to my few faithful followers, but I'm now moderating comments, and you'll have to fill in a Captcha as well. I do appreciate the sincerity of your comments, but this is the internet, and part of that is the dark sewer of spam that flows beneath the bright surface of friendly interchange. I'll be as timely as possible in posting whatever is written by an actual human being.
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