So, one of the necessary evils for selling a house is to make photos for the house listing... We've already let a couple of people who were interested in a private sale have a little personal tour of the place, but in the the end we went with a real-estate agent as we didn't want to go through with the hassle of organising everything whilst also needing to deal with the logistics of moving to the other side of the planet.

But... as all the agents have told us, part of the deal is to make good photos for the listing. This is what will hook people... and like all the houses on a real estate site, they are after some very neutral magazine style look. The sort that everyone aspires to, doesn't exist in real life... but are convinced that every other person's house looks like all the time! In essence, a sort of collective delusion and fantasy, where we all know to be untrue... but for some reason, we all aspire to it anyway. Despite the fact that we want our houses NOT to look like that! Or perhaps that is just me... not the aspiring part though.

So, the instructions from the real estate and the photographer were to remove anything personal and have fairly bare surfaces. Well... we live in a house with two young girls, both of which will tack up interesting drawings and stuff on the walls and doors (not permanently, just with blu-tack)... and more often than not, the parents (that's us!) will also put lots of drawings and pictures up on the walls... little things from when they were young and through to the present day. After all, that is what makes a home a home... and not just a house!

To our great sadness, at least for the next couple of days, we have had to remove everything down from the doors and the walls. On the other hand, we have had the impetus to clean up pretty thouroughly and to start throwing out all the things that were cluttering up the house, and those things that we wouldn't be shipping back to Australia anyway! The moving date is still quite a number of months away (we've actually booked the tickets now, so it is now a real concrete thing now!) so it is good to get the sorting of our personal stuff started earlier rather than later!

It definitely feels very weird to be living in a house where there is absolutely nothing on the walls and the doors, no pictures, no stickers, no drawings, no paintings. Nothing like that... it is almost like the day that we first moved into the house! Sigh, this will only be for one day longer... the photographer comes in the morning tomorrow, and hopefully after an hour, they will have taken all the photos that they need to present the house in the best light possible.

Personally, I would rather see a house in a sort of lived in, but tidy state. When looking through other real-estate websites (in Australia, seeing as that is where we will be buying our new home...) it is weird to see so many houses in a similar magazine-like state. It is sterile looking... and my wife's mother was telling us that she found some furniture that was on sale (second hand) that was described as "used for staging only". She had asked what that had meant... apparently, people (and agents) will go so far as to move in furniture for a photo-shoot of the house! No wonder so many places ended up looking the same!

Anyway, I can't wait to get our house looking a bit more like this... this was taken a while back, so the wall is a little less full than it was last night when we took it down. I'm not sure that I can really sleep tonight whilst looking at a completely blank wall!

On the plus side, my coin collection is now fully catalogued and I have a clean and almost empty desk to clutter up after tomorrow!

I can also be found cross-posting at:
Hive
Steem
Publish0x

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