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By SARAH SMILEY
Cleaning House: It Better Be Worth It!
Dustin and I are preparing to sell our house, and our real estate agent advised us to make our house look a little less “lived in.”So Dustin and I have spent the last week buried beneath piles of old clothes, unused wedding gifts, and toys that are missing essential parts. (Why we never got rid of these things, I do not know.) We have cleaned baseboards, painted rooms, mopped floors and hidden personal items.
The house now is cleaner and more organized – in preparation for the total strangers who will tour it and hopefully purchase it – than it ever has been for our visiting relatives, or even us.
But all that unwanted stuff we cleaned out had to go somewhere. It wouldn’t just evaporate, even though I prayed that it would. So it ended up in our garage.
“We need to have a garage sale,” I told Dustin.
The look of horror on his face was similar to the one he had several years ago at a previous house when I told him that our dog had dug up an entire tree in the backyard and dragged it, by her teeth, out to the golf course.
Dustin can’t think of many things more degrading than hawking unwanted items on the driveway at an ungodly hour. You can take a perfectly good yet superfluous crockpot, slap a garage-sale sticker on it and set it on the concrete, and instantly, it looks like junk. What’s worse than that, however, is watching strangers pick through your belongings, things you cared about two years ago but now have a $1 sticker on them, and wondering if they think it’s weird that you have a book titled “How to Massage Your Cat.”
Then, as if it were a sign from above (or, at least, from the president of the homeowners’ association down the street), a newsletter arrived in our mailbox announcing the neighborhood’s yearly community garage sale.
We took items out to the driveway quickly that morning while the kids still slept. We had to hurry before they saw us selling their
“How much for this stuffed duck?” they asked.
“Oh, I don’t know. How about a dollar?” I said.
“A dollar? Are you kidding?”
“OK, 50 cents then?”
“Make it ten cents and you’ve got a deal.”
The buyer walked away with my son’s duck flung over his shoulder. I had ten cents in my pocket and not one ounce of hope for all our other belongings that now seemed unfairly cheapened by the round, colorful price tags imposed on them. I was tempted to yell after the customer, “Oh yeah, well, I was just going to throw that away anyhow!”
Several minutes later, a woman and her son were shopping. The son wanted one of my son’s toy airplanes.
“No, that’s junk,” the mom said. She blushed when she realized that I had heard. I smiled warmly, as if to say, “It’s OK, I know what you meant.” What I was really thinking, however, was, “It’s ALL junk, lady.” I let her son take the airplane for free.
By noon, we still had more than half our items left to sell. We planned to give the rest to the Salvation Army. But loading everything up and driving it downtown seemed like yet another giant hurdle to having our house look “less lived in.”
So Dustin said, “The next person who comes up, tell them, ‘Everything a dollar.’ And I don’t mean each thing a dollar; I mean everything – all of it – one dollar.”
Our next customer didn’t think that sounded like a fair deal. All they wanted was our blender. Dustin told them they could have the blender and everything else – even the bent measuring spoon – for one dollar.
We ended up giving them the blender for free.
“Time for Plan B,” Dustin said. “How about we pay the next person one dollar to take all of this away?”
A customer walked onto the driveway and peered into our box of old video tapes. “Can I give you $5.00 for this whole box,” he asked.
“No, I’ll pay you five dollars to take all of this away,” Dustin said.
The man turned to leave.
“How about 20 dollars?” Dustin said. “Twenty dollars and we’ll pay your gas!”
We realized then that our real estate agent was right. There is much to gain by organizing and cleaning a house to put it on the market. But there is also a significant price to pay.
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Sarah Smiley is the wife of a Navy pilot and daughter of a retired Navy pilot. She is the author of “Going Overboard: The Misadventures of a Military Wife” (Penguin/NAL), and her syndicated column “Shore Duty” appears weekly in military and civilian newspapers across the country. Read more about Sarah at her website, www.sarahsmiley.com.
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