Miscellaneous, etc.

Yesterday was sunny, warm, breezy and all the things that make May afternoons in Southern Ontario marvelous.  It was the kind of day where sitting on your porch leads to a surprise sunburn.  It was the kind of day where the jets leave long, thin trails in the sky that only start to smudge after a half an hour.  It was the kind of day, in other words, perfect for Open Houses.

I’ve bought a house before, but I’ve never had to sell one.  I hear from others about the ordeal of keeping your place as neat as a pin for weeks — or months, depending — at a time, while you stay in a constant state of readiness for a potential buyer to come through.  Having lived, up until a month or so ago, a relatively austere lifestyle, I didn’t think that was such a big deal.  But now? With two cats (one perpetually diarrhetic and one who panic-sheds his body weight when you try to hug him) and a girlfriend moved in? 

I cannot imagine.

So I always feel a bit weird about going into Open Houses, vaguely guilty about wandering through someone else’s carefully manicured home, tailored to meet my buying requirements.  I have a knack for finding the hidey-holes where people have crammed their excess stuff, wherever it may be.  I’m that guy:  The one who just has to see in that cabinet in the back of the kitchen; the dude who looks under the deck; the jackass who can’t just accept that the garage is two-car, and has to go nosing around to see all the extra bookshelves and heavily-used catboxes that were shoved in there.

I’m not trying to be intrusive, but I can’t seem to help crossing that line at some point during my visit.  Sharp observers will notice a change in posture after I’ve done so, as well:  my hands will go from happily pointing at neat features to firmly clasped behind my back.  I can’t help it if I found your extra tampon cache, anonymous homeowner!  I didn’t mean to discover what your preferred anti-fungal cream is!  If you went to the trouble of concealing your crummy K-Mart wine rack, why not your series of prescriptions on your bathroom counter?  It’s not my fault! Quit making me feel guilty!

Anyway.  Anyway.  My nosiness aside, we must have visited a half-dozen places yesterday, and taken the time to walk through at least half.  It’s funny the process you go through when you’re looking at a home, and how quickly you’ll go from that fragile neutral point down one of three paths:

1. This place is way, way beneath me.
2. This place is way, way out of my league.
3. This place is nice oh my god it’s perfect can you imagine us here oh wow.

Tina and I actually got to sample one of each, including one spot that featured an extra “fourth level”, which was in fact a subterranean basement bedroom carved out of the cold clay.  If not for the concrete, the walls so temporary that they didn’t even meet the ceiling, and the overall “repurposed sex dungeon” feel, we might have gone for it.  But on a second look, the concrete, plaster and sex-slavery atmosphere were all that was there in the first place.

On the upside, it had two (2) fireplaces, and one (1) bar that looks like it was constructed as part of a set in a school play.  Possbily Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf.

The nice place was the sort of house that you start to tour, and it ends up being so big that you’re actually bored by the time you’re finished.  Bored and a little bit angry.  There’re only so many times that you can say, “Wow, look at the work they did on [insert home fixture]!  That must’ve cost [insert wild-assed guess, in increments of a thousand dollars]!”  After a while, by the time you get to the basement and there’s another wall made of solid marble, or another four-piece bathroom, you’re just fatigued.  You’re tired of feeling bad about your toilet room with the plastic towel rack, you’re sick of this gigantic immactulate house making you feel bad that you left your socks on the floor at home.

Maybe, if you had nearly seven hundred thousand dollars kicking around, you might feel differently.  But you don’t.  You don’t and you won’t any time soon, so to hell with the beautiful and expensive house.

The third place we visited, not unlike porridge in an ursine fairy tale, had the air of being just right.  Owned by an MBA and her engineer husband, kept beautifully and upgraded attractively, suspiciously affordable and with a chestnut tree in the backyard, we toured it about three times.  Tina would gesture subtly and murmur to herself about ivy, or candles in a fireplace, or “phantom doors”; I would constantly perform mental math to see if we could actually stretch far enough to live in the place.  The real estate agent could smell our interest, and after swapping business cards and making an appointment to find out what (little) market value our current place has, we found ourselves out in the driveway.

“You like it,” I said to Tina, on the way down the drive way.

“I like it,” she answered.  We talked about all the ways she liked it, all the ways that I agreed with her, and all the fun we could have in a place like that.  As we drove back to the townhouse, I kept the sunroof open and enjoyed the sunshine, the breeze, the happy weekend optimism that let us believe that how many chairs you could fit on the deck was to choosing a home.

This morning I loaded up the mortgage calculator and remembered all those other decision-making factors, but man it was fun while it lasted.