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.