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.

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.

Celebrate!

I've been impressed by the thoughtful responses to my previous post, about the difficulty of responding to an unintentionally awkward question in the aftemath of a loss. In some sense, the grieving person is put in the position of trying to ease the pain of the questioner, while having to deny his or her own feelings, however briefly.

Such denial contributes at least one more paving stone to the road to depression. Like all roadbuilding, it is a cumulative process, only not as obvious. So if that road is to be cut off, we need to find ways to stop building it, or reduce the pace of the project.

One way is to celebrate. If you hit the online dictionary, you'll find several different meanings, each of which suggests some approaches.

1. To observe with ceremonies of respect, festivity, or rejoicing.

In the case of the departure of a loved one, whether through death, divorce or duplicity, there are still things to celebrate:

• there was a time when we were the best of friends
• there were times when we understood each other perfectly
• we forgave and forgot the other times, at least for a while if not forever
• life was challenging, comfortable, exhilarating, difficult, worthwhile
• I grew up a little (or a lot): especially in regard to....

2. To perform (a religious ceremony):

• In certain cultures, a household shrine, or a table of mementoes, commemorates the ongoing presence of the spirit of the departed.
• In the case of some acrimonious departures, a dart board can be a target of ceremony that at the least reduces stress
• Writing a list of all of the things that one is thankful for, and all the others that were painful, and then burning it (preferably outdoors or in a fireplace) along with statements like, "Thank you for our love: I release you, and you me" or, conversely, "Begone miserable witch/warlock, and haunt no more this sphere of misery" can be as meaningful, if not more, as any priest or prophet can conjure.

3. To extol or praise:

• We generally get our first chance to do this at a memorial service or a funeral, but the stress levels are very high, despite the presence of empathetic supporters. So it needs to be done again, and again.
• The obituaries offered by the funeral homes are bland lists of living relatives, with standard phrases that conjure nothing of the intensity of feeling and emotion. And if you have too many survivors, the high cost of listing them brings out the natural Scrooge in many of us. And yet, "survived by her loving husband, Alfred, et al." would seem unkind at best. So put pen to paper, fingers to keyboard, mouth to mic, and write speak or record what you really feel. Then see that at least one other person reads, hears or sees it.
• With the passage of time, the mind blots up the inky spots of bad memories, and so, writing an annual or unscheduled remembrance is likely to take on a more silvery gloss as the days become weeks and the weeks months. Rereading previous peans will encourage you to see that indeed, you have actually grown emotionally and spiritually, because all paths eventually lead to forgiveness and understanding.

Note that I do not refer to those horrible, smarmy couplets that appear in newspapers, picked from prescripted Hallmarkian anthologies. "You are gone but not forgotten, though the leaves of fall be rotten".

No indeed. If smarm is your thing, well, good on you. I'm just saying that you can do better. As the Moody Blues put it, "Say what you mean, and mean what you say." "Best damn husband I ever had" is good, and true, especially if you've only had one so far.

4. To make widely known; display. Well, why not? If the mayor of your city, town or village can declare a day to honor a celebrity or an occasion, you certainly can do the same amongst your friends and relations.

An email message that has as its subject line : "I hereby declare: Today is Jo Day" is bound to attract attention. But do not pass it along by the carbon copy method. Send out one to each of the persons who would care, each one highlighting a different memory. It is impossible to remember everything about another that we would wish to remember. But in the replies you are bound to get, there will be others, some of which you may well never have know.

And should the day commemorate someone who is best forgotten, the above exercise should provide an opportunity to indulge in a little rueful irony, which may well help with the healing of feeling.