No Regrets

My Tschotkes, My Self

This is my favorite sheep. Now it's boxed up, along with its fellows and hundreds of books and thousands of CDs.
Like many people, I don't like to think of myself as materialistic. I can offer all sorts of quite plausible rationalizations about how while I am certainly fond of creature comforts and all my "stuff," I'm not really attached to any of it.
This is a flat-out lie. The facts speak for themselves: over the past 6 years Answerjack and I have devoted a considerable amount of energy and more than a little cash to schlepping 15,000 pounds of "stuff" from sea to shining sea and  back again, and in the past few weeks I have been maniacally mono-focused on moving it all once (please just once!) again. Even after the ritual pre-packing disbursement of excess goods to charitable organizations, offspring, friends and the junk man, there's still an astonishing amount of stuff left to be organized, wadded in newsprint or bubblewrap, placed in boxes, taped, labeled, stacked and, a week from today, loaded onto a great big truck.

The sheer quantity is partly a function of our stage of life—you don't get to be this age without acquiring personal goods, and then some—and our circumstances: marrying in mid-life merges established households, and weeding out the redundancies can take years. Who knew? A lot of the stuff reflects our interests and/or obsessions, like  33 boxes of books (yep, I counted 'em); 4,500 or so CDs; and 11 boxes of the unclassifiable ephemera I use to make art.  Then there's my collection of sheep tschotkes (one weensy box) and the exotic electronics that stoke Answer's audiophilia (many many boxes, the originals in which the equipment arrived from artisan's workshops in the heartland or just-in-time manufacturers in Asia).

Here is what our living room looked like before:

(That's Ravi and Megumi's she-wolf Kona, visiting for Christmas. The rental looks pretty good in photographs, huh? Trust me, it's a dump.)
And now after:

All the books and CDs are packed, and the crate awaits the cats—Miss Minxie and Murphy, the Serial Killer.  I weave my way through the stacks of neatly labeled boxes that compendiate our life, which is not the same as actually having our life. One more week!

Shelter: Monster House, Part One

Monster House,  Cynthia Romanov 2005
August, 2002

Here is one explanation for how we came to acquire a massive, cash-sucking, colonial-revival brick pile in an ossified old-money enclave in Baltimore: the peculiar insanity that besets refugees from overheated real estate markets like San Francisco, wherein victims are rendered completely senseless by the sharp retort of a bigger bang for the buck in a less volatile market. An alternative explanation is offered near the end of the post. You can decide for yourself which is the more plausible.
A house hunt in an unfamiliar place is difficult under the best of circumstances, and we had some of the worst. Answerjack had taken a job just outside Baltimore in a community of strip malls and Pentecostal churches and was staying nearby  in a furnished apartment. I was wrapping up a major project in Oakland and joining him on weekends. I’d fly east on Fridays to be driven around Baltimore by the don of the mob of local real estate ladies, our search handicapped by a dearth of inventory and our specs of an acoustically viable space for the biggest home audio system speakers in the known universe. Answerjack, a serious audiophile, had come to our relationship burdened with these behemoths, which had only ever been installed in spaces specifically designed around their needs. We'd barely survived a to-the-studs remodel on one coast, and were absolutely certain that we did not want to do the same on the other. The house had to be turnkey.

One Sunday afternoon, the real estate lady took us to a 6,000-square foot classic brick center hall colonial revival. It  had languished on the market for months and just that day been reduced to a price that was OK by California standards but pretty exorbitant by any other. As we pulled up to the curb the broker got a call that an offer on the house had just been accepted, but she urged us to go ahead with the tour anyway, informing us, “It’s on the best street in Guilford!” which caused me to frame the excursion as a sort anthropological expedition to see how the haute bourgeoisie live in Baltimore, not exactly a party but a lot more appealing than whiling away a couple of hours at BWI, our next stop.

Brick center-hall colonials of all sizes share certain characteristics: they are boxy, symmetrical, have uniformly-spaced multiple-pane windows, and a door in the middle. Fans of the genre place enormous importance upon the external variations—veranda wings, porticos, fancy brickwork on the chimneys and such—that distinguish each house from its neighbor, and use subjective terms like “gracious” and “elegant” when describing them. To a non-fan, they all look like the drawings of not very creative children. Plus, coming from the geologically dynamic Pacific Rim, their profligate display of brick, which in California is simply incipient rubble, topped with slate roof shingles so heavy that a single tile shaken loose would smash one’s skull like a melon, filled me with a vague sense of unease.
3801 Greenway, a prime example of the genre, was on a vast corner lot with standard-issue landscaping that could have used some attention. It sat well back from the street, down a long cement walk through a huge expanse of thirsty-looking lawn leading to an oversized  door with a shiny brass plaque inscribed with the owner’s name. The lady of the house was waiting for us on the threshold because, as we found out later, the doorbell did not work.

Here is what I saw during our sweltering 20-minute tour: three stories of endless enormous rooms crammed with furniture; 4 fireplaces; original workmanship of a quality that no longer exists at any price; and some tragic pockets of pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey remodel blight, including a ghastly '70s kitchen designed by the owner of a brick company to showcase his firm's product. The entire mishegoss was presided over by a recently widowed superannuated southern belle, who during her 17-year tenure as chatelaine had obviously figured out the absolute minimum home maintenance that would allow her to show her face in public without being pelted with rocks by her fellow Guilfordians. She was pious—the house bristled with crucifixes and there was a lovely old  prieu-deau in her bedroom—and smelled great (Hermés Caleche—I saw it on her dressing table).

Here is what Answerjack saw: a 30-foot living room that was big enough for the speakers.

We thanked the owner and the broker for their time and drove to the airport, chatting idly about the jumbo house, trying to guess the number of rooms—12? 13? —and bathrooms—7? 8?  Imagine—she and her husband had rattled around in that gargantuan place for years; they’d bought it after their kids were grown! We snickered over a needlepoint pillow on one of the sofas that depicted the owner as the figurehead of a ship, bearing the legend  “La Belle Hélène.”  We assured each other that somewhere in Baltimore a house was waiting for us, and sometime soon we’d find it. I flew back to Oakland and Answer returned to the land of strip malls.

Late that night, Answerjack was abducted by aliens, who skipped the tacky probe part of the abduction and went straight to insidious mind control, compelling him to drop a note in Old Belle’s mailbox thanking her, again, for the tour of her Lovely Home. Should anything happen with the current offer, we might be interested, read the note in handwriting that resembled my husband's. Belle called him pronto: the buyers had run away screaming after the house inspection. She knocked 50K off the price and Answer bought it on the spot, as is. He called me at work and presented it as a fait  accompli.

Because Answerjack is a highly intelligent man, responsible and reasonable, I thought he was joking. He had to be, because no intelligent person would buy a house after a 20-minute visit during which the owner dogged his every move. No responsible person would buy, as is, a house that had just flunked its inspection, a house that lacked air-conditioning, which in Baltimore's pestilential climate is as essential to human survival as a functioning furnace is to inhabitants of Anchorage. And no reasonable man would buy a house without discussing the purchase with his wife.

It took a bit of conversation before I realized that is indeed what had happened. I was having a hard time making sense of what sounded like a garbled dispatch from a distant planet—Answer's voice, or something like it, explaining that the buyers who had dropped out just didn’t understand old houses, but he did, and this was a Great Old House, and now it was ours.

Home, Again

Love, at perhaps the 100th site.
It's been quite a journey: we've poked through dozens of houses during our epic 4-month quest for shelter and electronically screened hundreds more. We had a full-price offer rejected by greedy sellers, wooed but lost a decrepit old high-maintenance charmer to a sugar daddy sweeter than we could afford to be, and inhaled so deeply of Nag Champa and other combustible resins at a property in Marin County that we were moved to make an offer on  a log cabin. We looked at lovely homes in unfortunate settings (above a freeway, perched in a slide zone, straddling a fault line) and crappy two-by-six wood-frame constructs in gorgeous groves of redwoods pruned to frame jaw-dropping views. We saw houses accessed by vertiginous flights of mossy stone steps leading up to (Piedmont) and down to (Fairfax) the front door, and a few sturdy, snooze-inducing ranchers on level ground with striking views into the neighbor's windows. We watched  hideously overpriced properties languish on the market and good properties close very quickly. We got to know our two real estate agents (one in Marin, one in the East Bay) really, really well. I made the 5-hour round-trip overnight schlep from our temporary domicile in the hinterboonies to the SF area 19 times. Tomorrow I drive in for the 20th time, to sign the papers for our home.

Our search ended where it started: Marin County. The house is in Fairfax, not far away from the log cabin and the needy old dear, up a twisty road in some spots too narrow for two-way traffic. Unlike the three previous houses Answerjack and I have owned together, this one is ready to move into—no walls begging to be knocked down, no earth to be moved, no knob-and-tube wiring to be replaced lest the house burn to the ground the first time Jack revs up his sound system. The house was very well built by a local  contractor for his family, a simple thoughtful design, no architectural gimcracks or geegaws. Escrow closes next week. We're renting back to the sellers so their kids can finish the school year, and then we move in: home again, at last.

Japan: Messengers of the Gods

Divine messenger at ease. He knows he's cool.
The beautiful, ancient city of Nara is chockablock with Buddhist temples, Shinto shrines, and famously mercenary deer. Camera-ready attractions are conveniently clustered inside Nara Park, which is ruled with an iron hoof by a cartel of deer that has successfully leveraged the legend of one of their own bearing the god of a local shrine on its back into an entitlement  program that gives them the run of the place in perpetuity.
Signs warn that Nara deer can be bossy, and they are. Each year their pointy little horns are ceremonially sawn off and the stumps blunted to nubbins to prevent them from inflicting serious damage on sightseers. Enjoying protected status as messengers of the gods, they are free to work the crowds, aggressively soliciting shika-senbei (deer crackers) sold at stands throughout the park and terrorizing small children. Here the herd skillfully separates a little girl from her mother to shake her down for whatever she's got in her Hello Kitty purse. She's about to scream, but she's not going to bleed.
It's worth running the deer gauntlet to get to the treasures of Nara, which include the Daibutsu, the largest of Japan's large Buddha statues, appropriately housed in the world's largest wooden building—the Chinese-inflected Daibutsu-den, an architectural marvel whose vast dim interior is scented by the sillage of 1300 years worth of incense. The Kasuga Taisha Shinto shrine at the far end of the park is reached through a primeval pine forest so deep and dense that all sound is absorbed, and walking there becomes an act of silent meditation. Surrounding these major foci of worship are dozens of minor shrines and temples consecrated to various deities and spirits. Being in Nara is like visiting St.Peter's—you don't have to be a believer to be moved by what is evidenced there; you just have to believe in belief.

Answerjack and I are equal opportunity respecters. We light candles in cathedrals and touch the foot of Saint Peter in Rome. Jack's kissed the Wailing Wall, and we leave chocolate and whiskey at Marie Leveau's crypt in New Orleans. In Nara, we paid our respects to the Buddha and the kami with offerings of incense and yen. At a small shrine near Kasuga Taisha, our guide wrote the characters representing our deepest personal wish on an ema and we hung it on the shrine's fence, bowing in accordance to custom. We really meant it.

It would make such a heartwarming story if we had found a house immediately upon our return to the States. Not. In fact, the batch of newly listed houses that I stumbled through in a haze of jet lag and dismay constituted a nadir of sorts, the sorriest assortment of greed-driven failed flips, REOs and down-market staging yet. It is a measure of my despair that when I saw on Craig's List that an acquaintance was renting out guest quarters in the lower level of her house in the Bay Area, I was seriously tempted to give her a call, even though I know for certain that she is barking mad: the idea of moving there during what was shaping up to be an interminable  house hunt seemed, briefly, to be an improvement over making the 300-mile round trip schlep from the foothills every 4-5 days. The moment passed, thank heavens, and we found our house a week later.

  

Shelter: The Roar of the Crowd

40 Marina Cove Court, San Rafael, California

Isn't this an adorable house? It's even cuter in person. It sits on a hill overlooking the marina in San Rafael; a little room perched up a short flight of stairs off the master bedroom has a bank of windows dedicated to the view, which when the house was built as a weekend cottage in 1930 must've been a picturesque cove filled with fishing boats and the occasional yacht. It's still awfully atmospheric, albeit a lot more crowded than the water or the shore was 78 years ago.
The house seeps charm from all pores. Check out the beams in the living room. They're in the garage, too, which is a space just waiting to be converted to a music room for Answerjack. Unlike most of the houses that pique my interest, this one would not require massive structural and aesthetic interventions, although the walls are begging for a coat of flat paint to cover an array of faux-finish sins.
The kitchen has a BTU-spewing cook top, a small Sub Zero refrigerator and about 5,000€ worth of swoon-inducing copper cookware from Dehillerin, presumably not included in the sale.
The yard is a leafy jewel,with little benches tucked away here and there, inviting you to pause, contemplate the vistas, and just try to hear yourself think over the incredible roar of traffic. It is hands down the very noisiest house, inside and out, that I've ever looked at on either coast. It overlooks Point San Pedro Road where it turns into Third Street, one of the busiest thoroughfares in Marin County. The RE broker and I stood outside in the shady bower, desperately shouting insane denials like "MAYBE A NICE BURBLING FOUNTAIN WOULD HELP MASK THE NOISE" at each other before getting a grip and fleeing to the car. It's a pity, because were it not for the traffic, which is truly terrible, I'd have made an offer on the spot.

I know what comes next: someone will fall crazy in love with the house's considerable charms, buy it, and wake up (early, every morning—it's a prime commute route) to a screeching nightmare of never-ending noise. Or, best-case scenario, a nice hearing-impaired couple will snap it up and dwell there in perfect peace and contentment. Sigh.

We're still looking.

Code Busters: Acronyms From the Front

Rivoli, Robert (impasse) Cynthia Romanov 2008
The code to real estate-speak is pretty transparent, the stuff of rueful jokes swapped by suckers lured to open houses promising a "first time on market fairy-tale cottage w/original architectural details and great bones" only to find themselves touring a plywood shack, untouched since it was tossed up some weekend in the middle of the last century, complete with a 7-digit price tag and a hundred-page disclosure. Here are some up-to-the-minute, new-to-the-local-market additions the lingo, and the free translations thereof: "BOM" (back on market after being yanked for a reality check); "seller motivated" (it's going into foreclosure); and—unthinkable in this neck of the woods only a few months ago—"new price" (the property has languished on the market at an exorbitant asking that last year would have been accepted without question but is not flying in the current economic climate, forcing sellers to adjust their expectations downward). "REO" is the Queen Mother of RE suck-itude: the bank owns the property and the (now-former) owners are SOL. And here's a radical term, familiar to the cogniscenti: the "apples to apples" deal. That means—and we're talking true real estate sedition here—that a 3-bedroom, 2-bath house in a desirable Bay Area location which sold 6 months to a year ago for, say, a million dollars, is now listed on the market at exactly what the current owners paid for it.

This is major news, not yet widely broadcast in the areas Answerjack and I are targeting for our house search (Marin County, Berkeley, Oakland Hills) but common enough in the nether regions of the greater Bay Area as well as most of the rest of the country. It's creeping closer to the anointed real-estate sacristies that have thus far enjoyed dispensation from the harsh economic exigencies of the open market. It's good news for some—perhaps Answerjack and me, since we have no house to sell before buying a new one—and very bad news for others, rapacious speculators and hapless homeowners alike. Now, no one is going to weep for the speculators who contributed so generously to the creation of our profoundly dysfunctional local RE dynamic. Old Testament types may invoke phrases like "just desserts." But I've been thinking about  regular families, specifically the kids whose homeowner mommies and daddies, whether through lousy judgement or simple bad luck, find themselves mired in the current RE mishegoss. Whatever their parents did or did not do that resulted in a "seller motivated/new pricing!" deal, to say nothing of the dreaded REO—these kids are taking the consequences squarely on their vulnerable little chins.

I've been haunted by our look-see of a "distressed" house in a fantastic Marin County location (privacy, sweeping vistas, acres of adjacent protected open space). The back story of xx Upper Fremont is painfully apparent: a family with a couple of kids bought this disaster zone 2 years ago at the height of the market, did not have the liquidity to make even basic repairs, recently tried to sell it for about what they owe on the loan but the buyer backed out. Now it's BOM, and to the blurb copy claim that it is through "no fault of the property," the only reasonable response is "Liar, liar, pants on fire." The place is a wreck. I mean truly a wreck: two illegal units, one of which does not have a kitchen. The master bath is ripped out to the studs. Sub flooring only throughout. Not a single closet has a door. There are no window coverings. The kids, teenagers apparently, live in the non-contiguous lower unit, apart from their parents. The two units are dirty, smell bad, and, as our Marin agent, who is incredibly nice and has seen a lot in her time, noted with sweet understatement, "This is not a happy place." Indeed. People, it's not even a safe place: the inspection performed at the potential buyer's behest notes that the extensive decking is rotting away from the house, the roof has reached the pull-by date, and just about nothing is up to code. The owners and their kids have been living like muleskinners for the past 2 years. It's days away from foreclosure, becoming a REO.

Now, I've admitted in previous posts that a catalogue of massive flaws in a house is but sweet nothings whispered into the ears of a couple of real estate romantics house restoration sluts like Answerjack and me, but our offspring are grown. Whatever Mum and Paternicus chose to do with the kids' eventual inheritance has no impact on the quality of their day-to-day lives. Plus we have demonstrated an ability to learn from past mistakes, which is why even we passed on this bleak house. So what's been haunting me is how the Marin owners, who are clearly living on the margins, got in so far over their heads? What bank enabled them to tie their kids to the tracks of a runaway train of  grandiose/greedy speculation that home values w0uld continue to skyrocket? How did they figure that the awesome view of the sunset from their crumbling family seat would make up for the lack of a reasonable expectation that the roof would still be over their heads come dawn?

The answers to these questions are in the headlines of the San Francisco Chronicle and the New York Times just about every day, and yeah, I've read all the articles and analyses. But observing first hand how the national RE crisis is playing out for one just one real, live family among the 233,ooo homeowners facing foreclosure last month alone is sobering. Here are our local stats, county by county. Read 'em and weep, if not for the people who can't pay the mortgages, then for  the kids who are attached to them, through no (de) fault of their own.

Shelter: A Cautionary Tale About Greed

Here are those cute little pigs again. Behind them is 6766 Armour Drive in Oakland's Montclair district, the first House That Got Away from us. It was a bit of a surprise when it did, because we made a full-price offer with a swift clean close (20 days), and there were no other offers on the table. But the sellers, perhaps nostalgic for the good old days when multiple buyers would whip each other into a competitive lather while their RE agents frantically added digits to contracts before sprinting to the seller's door to tender their inflated offers, declined. Wanted to drum up a bidding war, which never materialized. After a few more open houses, only one other offer dribbled in, so Porky and Petunia here had to take it.

Escrow on the sale of the property just closed. Public records indicate that it sold for 10K under asking price. The sellers had to carry the mortgage for a month beyond the proposed close of escrow for the first, full-price offer—ours—as well as pay the rent on the stunt furniture.

And we're still looking for a house.

Shelter: Grandson of the One That Got Away

43 Bay Road, Fairfax, CA
The third property we bid on but did not get displays, in high relief, the key qualities we seek out when looking for a cash sinkhole house to buy:  an off-kilter je ne sais quois, an appalling asking price, and an urgent need for extensive remodeling. Of course we had to bid. How could we not? Our solemn Never Again vows, repeated with anguished conviction after each relationship-rocking, wallet-reaming re-do, are always ready to be rescinded at the first seductive whisper from A House With Potential. This one I was prepared to kiss on the lips. This house needs us.
Actually, this house needs a lot of things. Let's start with a kitchen. This picture here? That's the entire existing kitchen, and it's the best shot—the hole in the ceiling where a vent used to be is out of the frame.
The heart of the house is a 1930s Marin County weekend getaway with sturdy, vaguely nautical bones and a few terrific surviving art deco details. The rest of the house is an architectural and infrastructural disaster zone, the victim of a criminally cheapshit  '70s expansion and decades of deferred maintenance lurking under a quick coat of fresh paint. The asking price is nearly a million dollars.
Like a couple of other places in which I've lived, this house was the site of a death, in this case of natural causes: the old lady who lived there died there, too, apparently without the comfort of an upstairs loo, which the 100+ page disclosure document indicated had some truly disgusting problems.
But the site is beautiful, with a lovely view out into the canyon and a pleasing round patio that echoes the jaunty tug-boat contours of the house's footprint. My mantle of virtuous intent was off  like a prom dress soon after I walked through the door, and in no time at all I was pumping my way through a thousand enthusiastic scenarios: knocking down that wall between the joke kitchen and the dining room. Installing soapstone or maybe vertrazzo counters in the new kitchen. Preserving that original deco shower door at all costs. Glass tile? Yes! Upstairs, more walls were waiting to be turned into rubble (I love that). Ripping out that vile loo, re-directing the plumbing and turning the entire second story into a suite with a sitting room and a cleverly hidden energy-efficient washer/dryer stack! My study on the first floor is sunlit and ready for occupancy. Answerjack's music room is over the garage, away from the main living space. He can crank up the sound to stratospheric decibel levels (OK, after the entire place is rewired), and I don't have to be a crank about it. Yes! I guesstimate the price tag for turning these fantasies into reality, double the figure, convince myself  it's still within the realm of possibility and call Answerjack for an enabling boost on my way to the airport. He's jazzed, too.
In the air I crack open the disclosure document, which is voluminous, and start slogging my way through it. Not many surprises until somewhere above the Midwest, when I get to the engineering report. The house sits on a hillock, and the hillock is crumbling. That cute little round patio is built on uncompacted soil disgorged during the original excavation work 70+ years ago, and it's about to slide down the canyon. Two areas of the hill are identified as problematic, and a rather large number is attached to the solution.
Our respective planes land in Florida, Answerjack and I meet up, and we make an offer on the house, backing out the cost of stabilizing the hillside. We take the call from our RE broker in California on Sunday while watching gaily costumed musketeers fire off a volley of noisy blanks on the seawall of the Castillo de San Marcos in St. Augustine. The offer is turned down; the trustees handling the sale of the house are hoping for more money. Well, gee golly, aren't we all?
No other offers are on the table. One of three things will happen next: someone with similar taste but with less experience and more liquidity will take on the project at the full asking price, OR it will languish for a while on the market, its naked neediness spooking potential buyers, until Answerjack and I can swoop in and Save It in a shower of cash OR we will find a house next week, Marin or Montclair, move our stuff in and be done with it. I'm quite open to all three possibilities, and completely unsure of which to hope for.

Update 3/07: Our Marin RE broker tells me that 47 Bay Road is under contract. That was quick!

Update 4/07: This house just closed escrow for 12K over asking price. It needs about 300K to make it habitable, but it will be undeniably gorgeous when the project is completed.

Shelter: Son of the One That Got Away

Here is the second house we bid on but did not buy. This one was in Fairfax, at the end of a street with that Old Marin mix of bungalows, Spanish Mediterraneans and muleskinner's shacks. The point of this house was not the actual house, which is is at its core a build-it-yourself project from a kit, but the setting, which is extraordinary: more than an acre of  fragrant, fern-filled forest ringed by a seasonal stream. The property is accessed by a cute little footbridge and is utterly still and private. Enchanting. I had an agreeable sense of sliding back through the decades to find myself a hippie chick again, newly arrived in the wilds of Marin and stunned by its beauty—and my good fortune to have found it. This illusion was reinforced by opening the door to find a long-haired guy inside the house, burning a stick of Nag Champa after enjoying a mid-morning doobie (we'd been told the house was empty). Ya gotta love Marin, and I do. Always have.
However, it's been quite a while since I was a hippie chick. Hardcore bohemian sensibilities notwithstanding, I'm a grown up, card-carrying member of the bourgeosie, and really, this piece of paradise did need some work. So we bid under the asking price and the house went to a buyer who offered  over asking, with a third potential buyer who was prepared to pay full price dropping out during the process—a fellow refusenik who, like I, would not be drafted into a bidding war. We lost it fair and square, according to the rules of the game, and walked away feeling disappointed but not screwed, the way we did by those little piggies at 6766 Armour in Montclair.
Some secondary story lines in the Fairfax narrative illuminate one of the local articles of faith that I keep reciting to Answerjack, who is not from around these parts: despite its cool cosmopolitan edge and wretched real-estate excesses, the San Francisco Bay Area is really just a little village. Everybody's story is connected to everyone else's, however tangentially. I love these connections, the who begat whoms and the tiny tugs on the thread that vibrate up and down the line.  Xtine's ex-husband also looked at the house and passed on it—not enough sunshine for his taste. Our Marin RE broker works with a woman I knew when our kids were students at the same elementary school in the City. Two glancing coincidences that illustrate the intricate web of connections binding a community of 7 million or so. It's what I've missed so acutely and what I'm so eager to reclaim. I just need to find a house to get back home.

Addendum 3/9/08: This house just closed escrow for 40K over asking price.

That hippie chick with some friends and family on a spring day in the country, circa 1972.

Shelter: All The World's a Stage

Over the past 8 years, I've gone house-hunting in Manhattan, Brooklyn, Princeton, Detroit, Baltimore, and Rockford, Illinois; Amador, Calaveras, and Tuolumne Counties in the Sierra foothills; and now Oakland, Berkeley, and Marin County. As previously noted, we've had an exceptionally difficult time settling down.

I did 3 major remodels in 5 years. If you re-did your kitchen or bath recently, I'm on a first-name basis with your fixtures and can identify the pattern of your stone surfaces at a glance. I've yet to meet a wall I was afraid to knock down. Fans of irony will appreciate that for the majority of the past 9 years, we've lived in rented housing on one coast or another, places in which the walls and bottom-of-the-bargain-bin fixtures have to stay put. Sadists will delight in the fact that our longest stretch in any one domicile—2 years and counting—has been in a rapidly deteriorating, hideously ill-construed and shoddily built contractor's spec house located in a place that another blogger (my chum Pamela) described  as "just west of the middle of nowhere." Thank god we don't own it—a previous owner shot himself to death in the back yard, and my guess is that despair at having purchased such a jank piece of crap contributed to the decision to pull that trigger.
So we can stipulate that I did not just fall off the back of a turnip truck when it comes to selecting, restoring, and selling a house. I've been at it for a while, but coming back at it big-time, in 2008, in the  Bay Area, has had a bit of a learning curve. While I was rusticating in the foothills, the rules of engagement for urban real estate were being completely re-written.
Here's a big one: no one actually lives in the house they are selling. Their stuff has left home, too: all traces of  real people, their pets and possessions have been purged. Before  a place goes on the market, it is completely emptied out. Then a school of real estate remoras attach themselves to the host and begin the process of  "staging" a house to sell for maximum profit. Walls are painted in neutral, trendy colors—in the span of a week I saw the same spa-worthy sage green on walls in houses in San Anselmo, Oakland, and a Hilton Resort in San Diego. Broadloom is ripped up to reveal wood floors, which are refinished and waxed to a fine sheen. Kitchens are refreshed by a quickie cosmetic peel that sloughs off old stoves and refrigerators and surfaces to be replaced by faux-industrial appliances and speckled granite counters straight from the big-box store. Gardeners unfurl yards of sod and install native plants. A truck arrives and disgorges roomfuls of au courant furniture, kilims, tschotkes, and anonymous art. Tableaux are arranged: here is the Boy's Room with the witty styled-like-a-car bed. Tutus, fairy wings and white wicker accessorize the Girl's Room. Mid-century modern for today's Teen. And for Mom and Dad, a bottle of Champagne and two crystal flutes on a tray on the bed in the Master Suite. A professional cleaning crew washes the windows, the stagemeister "chops" the throw pillows and only then does the house make its debut at the Broker's Open, a catered extravaganza in which hundreds of RE agents swarm the property, feeding on sushi.
Who pays for staging? The buyer. A seller reluctant to vacate the premises, put his/her stuff in storage and front the money for trendification needs only a brief tutorial about the hugely profitable return on the staging investment to be "incentivized" to camp out at the Claremont while the glammed-up house is on the market. It's worth maybe an extra 70-100K after all the dust has settled. Honest. And ( irony coming up) I'm told by reliable sources that at a certain price point the new owner just rips out the on-the-fly  kitchen anyway.
The staging ritual had its genesis in the era of blood-sport real estate, but in the current softer market it's reinforced by insecurity—buyers feel obliged to do everything possible to make their house competitive. Them's the rules, and while there's not much opportunity to opt out of playing in accordance, I do try. No matter how skillfully staged the house, I will not participate in a bidding war. And, as an act of civil disobedience, I fluff up those dopey chopped pillows whenever I encounter them on stunt furniture in staged houses in this totally screwed up market. I'm a rebel, all right.

This is an actual staged house in San Francisco. See how these pillows look like a karate enthusiast had at 'em? They're "chopped," one of the sure signs of a stagemeister.