By Sue Fagalde Lick
Houses are like people. They can never be perfect. At least not while people live in them. Even a vacant house is prey to dust, spiders and termites that slowly erode its condition.
Yet, when we prepared our house for sale, we tried to make it flawless. To that end, we spent three weeks obsessed with perfecting our imperfect house, even though 512 Safari Drive was far from perfect when we bought it.
We spent everything we had and borrowed more for a house that was small, dirty, broken-down and plagued with the ugliest paint and wallpaper we had ever seen. We bought it because we could afford it (almost) and it felt like home.
Over the years, we made some changes, removing the most offensive wallpaper, painting green and peach walls white, replacing loud linoleum with soft beige, and putting up tasteful paintings and photographs.
Still, the Safari house wasn't perfect. Our possessions jammed every corner, and we never felt free to invite many friends over because it couldn't possibly match their grand homes, which were purchased with matching his-and-her Silicon Valley incomes. We had no dining area, room for only four to sit in the living room, and our family room and guest bedroom had been turned into offices. The back yard was nice, but Santa Teresa Boulevard behind the fence made it too noisy to talk out there.
It was a temporary home, to live in until we could use our profits to move to Oregon, where we hoped to find fresh air, more house for our money and a beach within walking distance.
Deciding to sell meant making the house marketable, dolling it up and putting it on display, like waxing an old car and rubbing Armor-All on the tires before parking it on the street with a "For Sale" sign on it.
Our real estate agent gave us three weeks to repair the imperfections we had ignored for four years and probably would have lived with indefinitely. We never worked so hard in our lives.
We slapped on so much new paint, it got so that if it didn't move, we painted it. We paid someone to redo our popcorn ceilings, repaint the front of the house and tear off the curling, silver-striped wallpaper on one wall of our otherwise yellow bedroom.
We rented a storage locker and started filling it with furniture and boxes of books. We traded the big antique table for a little round one that made the kitchen look bigger.
We polished the kitchen cabinets, filled vases with fake flowers, displayed pots of new plants, washed all the windows and took the recipes and coupons off the refrigerator.
New habits were required. No longer could we leave toothpaste in the sink, dirty dishes on the kitchen counter, shoes on the living room floor, clothing on the bedroom chair, or newspapers all over the kitchen table.
At last, we were exhausted, but the house was perfect. Our real-estate broker was pleased when she arrived leading a tour of agents, the first to see the house. We held the door open, wished them "Good morning" and watched men and women in suits rush down our hallways, peering into our bedrooms.
In three minutes, it was over. We collapsed in relief. But more agents trickled in through the day, in a sort of grownup version of Trick or Treat.
When everyone was gone, I discovered a string of used dental floss left on the bathroom counter. Like all animals, humans leave tracks.
The house sold in five days. The agent credited our hard work. We were lucky. Within a week, the lawn was growing, the dog was dropping fur on the carpet, and some of our new plants were wilting. Alas, it is impossible to be perfect.
I suspect it isn't even necessary. Next time, we probably won't try so hard. The right buyers won't even notice that we have matching blue towels in the bathroom. They might notice, however, if one of us is in the shower at the time.
Until she answered the call of the Northwest, Sue Fagalde Lick was a feature writer for the Los Gatos Weekly-Times.
This article appeared in the Los Gatos Weekly-Times, August 7, 1996.
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