Our house is now listed with the MLS although I'm not sure why anyone in Major League Soccer will be interested.
The good news is that all the hard work is done. I might even get back to blogging or writing or photography more! Yea! Good news!
The bad news is that our house is no longer a home and has become, instead, a showplace. We need to vacuum more often, shampoo carpets more often, and put things away more often. And when anyone wants to come look at it, we need to run around like maniacs to make sure everything looks good -- optimizing it's marketability. Then, if possible, vacate the premises and go find some way of wasting one to two hours.
And poor Daisy has to go into a large dog carrying kennel because it is poor marketing to have her barking, "Go away! Go away!" But when I do have to put her in the kennel, I give her an obnoxious number of Doggie Treats.
The other good news is that if we can sell it, we can move closer to Karen's work and closer to the grandchildren -- although they spend lots of time here already. But it will cut down their commute as well.
The other bad news is that as long as it does not sell (estimated time-to-sale time in the current market is 8-12 months, although we've priced it to move quicker. Since, to make it look more open and appealing, we have removed tons of furniture into storage. So, for instance, I no longer have a bedtable so when I go to sleep, I put my glasses on the floor where I can step on them in the morning.
Anyhow, the realtor needed pictures for the listing and his pictures, well, were awful. So I took a batch of shots -- several of them panoramas that I stitched together with Photoshop because even my wide angle lens is not wide enough to show the whole bathroom in one picture.
Furthermore, it doesn't show the time I spent scraping out old caulking and putting in new caulking.
BAGMAN (Suddenly appearing in my blog for a moment, jumping up and down and yelling): "Mark was using his caulk! Mark was using his caulk!"
I hit him over the head with my caulk gun and shove him back out the door.
Where was I? Oh yes. I was also going to mention that we always shower and have seldom taken advantage of the whirlpool tub so we gave it to our cats and put the litter box in it. But that didn't seem appealing from a marketing point of view so we moved it to an upstairs bathroom floor hidden under the sink. The cats have not seemed to mind and adjusted well.
Okay, I'll continue posting pictures of the house because...well, I don't really know why. I guess I post them because they exist. One of those existential questions. Why do we post anything? It's not as if everyone in the World of Blog wants to see pictures of my bathroom. I just hope some prospective buyers see pictures of our rooms on the MLS and want to live in them.
So - Here is the house itself.
Looks like a postcard
And here is the...
...well, it is kind of the foyer to the left and the formal dining room in the middle (the dining room that we use on Thanksgiving and Christmas. (This photo straightened up pretty well with Photoshops Lens Correction tool -- unlike the bathroom).
Then turning around, we have part of the formal livingroom on the right (another unused room except for Christmas).
...plus a view into the kitchen which we use all the time and the stairs that go up to my office. (I did not shoot the office because even though I straightened it up and moved the computer against the wall (where I hate it), it still just looks like a little square room. And the MLS doesn't let you display everything!
Here is another view of the livingroom:
I took this shortly after the kids and grandkids moved in a few years ago. After consideration, we decided it was a little too cluttered to show prospective buyers. The difference between a home and a showplace.
And moving along, we have...
...a view of the den (or family room) as seen through the kitchen. This is actually one of the few areas in the house we actually use on a regular basis. I'm not quite sure why the lighting seems weird. I must have tinkered with the temperature. The refrigerator on the left really illustrates the difference between a house that is being "shown" and a regular home. It's all gleamy and white. When this was a home, it looked like this:
Now we come to the master bedroom, which I think is a a thoroughly prehistoric and sexist term for a bedroom. Although the alternative of "mistress bedroom" has it's own negative connotations.
Photographer's Confession: Trying to combine four photographs into one panorama in Photoshop really frustrated me on this one. They just didn't want to blend correctly. I think the Photoshop term is "stitch." (i.e., it dropped some stitches). I tried to correct places where it didn't match over and over again, mostly using the clone tool. Finally, I just uttered some choice words and decided that the realtor wouldn't notice at this size. But when I blow a section of it up...
It's easy to see that this photo has been doctored to death. But, believe it or not, it is a lot better than when it came out of the Photoshop Panorama Automated Gadget. None of the lines connected at all.
And finlly we have the guest room.
By this time I wasn't even worrying that horizon line wasn't horizontal. And, no, we don't really have curved ceilings.
So if you know anyone who is moving to Charleston...
Meanwhile, I'll go and vacuum the floors again and try to get up tomorrow without stepping on my glasses.
