Keeping it real (estate)

Exactly three years ago my husband and I entered the uniquely grownup, age-accelerating experience of buying a home. I have posted this before, but early summer and all the “for sale” signs around town when the weather turns warm always remind me of it. And I’m finally at a point where I don’t start to twitch when I talk about it. So, for old time’s sake, I’m posting this list I made around that time, in a gallows humor attempt to keep myself from losing it. Enjoy.

Here is a (non-comprehensive) list of things I won’t miss about our real estate search:

1. Euphemistic real estate-speak (e.g., “has potential” = is currently a sh*thole, but with a lotta love and the GDP of a small country, it could be okay; “has city views” = is hanging off a cliff, right at the smog level)

2. The weird competitive nature of fellow buyers – sizing one another up, creepy sidelong glances and instant antipathy, particularly if you like the house.

3. Hating everything about a house except for its funky green, vintage toilet.

4. Being shown homes with lavender bidets and being expected to keep a straight face.

5. Huge hot tubs built into itty bitty decks, thereby insuring that you either must have a hot tub or spend thousands removing it.

6. Physical accosting by agents at open houses, eager to be YOUR agent.

7. Magical thinking on pricing.

8. Receiving counter offers that are <0.05% less than original price.

9. F&cking moronic advice from your ex-agents to list your current house for sale before you find a new place. Because being homeless is “fun” for the whole family.

10. Jame Gumb-like basements – “it rubs the lotion on its skin. It does this whenever it’s told…”

11. “Front yards” that are dense seas of ivy masking dog feces and litter.

12. Being told that having a cliff as the border to your backyard is no problem, you just train your toddler not to fall off it. Besides, having a boy, you “should get used to spending a lot of time in the emergency room.” (see ex-agents from #9)

13. Pools that look like oversized urinals.

14. Gorgeous, tiled San Simeon-style pools that take up 80% of the yard on homes that, in terms of both size and quality, resemble my grandfather’s outhouse.

15. Giant, caged trampolines that fill the whole, depressing yard.

16. Houses that are surrounded on all sides by steep hills, inducing instant claustrophobia. To quote the Jimi Hendrix song, “feel like I’m living at the bottom of a grave.”

17. Houses that are so high up the canyon, I feel like I need a diving bell in my car.

18. Stacks of adult magazines and/or framed posters of bare, Brazilian-waxed women in the bedroom.

19. Bad karma houses: post suicide, illness, divorce, and death. You know this because the agent is whispering it in your ear, or the bedpans (that no one bothered to remove) give it away.

20. Houses that are staged with glasses of wine, highly mannered furniture, and Miami Vice-style art. Subtext: your life would be a 24-hour, glamorous, coke-filled party if you lived HERE!

21. Disliking a house, yet putting in an offer because you think you have a chance of getting this one. Like an absurd form of dating.

22. Being filled with dread and ennui on Sundays and Tuesdays.

23. Properties so remote and covered with flammable brush that you can practically hear the rattlesnakes, where you are strongly urged not to let your pets outside because of the coyotes and owls. And yet within the city limits, with big city prices and taxes.

24. Being asked to review and sign hundreds of pages of single-spaced, complex legal documents in under an hour.

25. Houses that smell like one great big cat litter box, mixed with mold.