"Shame you’re selling," said the chap at the petrol station as I gave him a good chunk of my wages, "you’ve got a really nice outlook there".
Wait, was he ... disappointed in me? I did not ask "who is this man and how does he know where I live?". Because in a small town everyone knows everything about you.
It’s probably the worst time to put my house on the market. Who knows? The real estate market is like a sourdough starter that grows and shrinks and refuses to die even when it’s got a nasty watery skin on the top.
They cooled it and then made it impossible to get a mortgage and now a little easier again, although it’ll take the average person 18 years to save a deposit ... I can’t keep up. There certainly hasn’t been a lot of movement on mine after the sign got hammered into the lawn.
The first people through were a couple of tyre-kickers who just wanted to see if anything had changed since their parents lived there. Verdict: nothing much had — but who did the painting in the hallway? She would really like one for herself.
You’ll be pleased to hear I strangled my feelings of annoyance in favour of a chance to champion the arts.
I was doing some painting of my own on the front steps when I heard what sounded like an advance scout vehicle for an alien landing. It kinda was.
A drone was right above my head. I’ve been at home now for two years straight pretty much and I didn’t know real estate agents used drones, so of course I completely freaked out. Somewhere there is footage of me shouting "What the actual
#%@*!", looking every bit the angry rural type shaking a fist at danged science.
If I’d had a single dinner party over these Covid years I probably wouldn’t feel so invaded. But the whole notion of an "open home" runs counter to all the iso-bubble-avoidance I’ve been practising, and the house has become such an extension of myself that I have to leave town when someone’s coming around because it feels like they’re having a rummage through my insides.
Now that it is being sold, the house has never looked more charming, the light coming through the fiercely clean windows in the morning has never been so golden. Hello blackbirds in the garden! Hello monarchs on the dahlias!
Every day I have to fight through the tangles of an emotional connection to this wee art deco, the first house I ever bought, to get to the other side and reconnect with rationality and prudence.
The house even has a name: Wedding Cake House (God, what is it with me and marriage? You’d think I had a thing about it.) for its white icing plaster work and the chunky curved walls that look like they might hide a sandwich of red velvet sponge. But I’ve finished everything that needed doing and it’s time to move on, let someone else have a bite of the real estate cake.
Buying a house is the biggest and scariest financial transaction of your life. When you open your internet banking and see how much you are in the minus, the shock of owing that much money takes a while to wear off.
Once you pass through the fear barrier you become quite blase, and transition into someone special: a person with a mortgage. People with mortgages tend to be black-humoured: in debt until they die, they are the envy of the rest of the country.
"Oh, how I wish I could be shackled to fortnightly repayments more than half my salary," people think.
I had a catheter once, after surgery on my kidney. I’d rather be shackled to that — but I guess it’s less of a marker of success.
Change is as good as a holiday, and I haven’t had one for years.
I’ve seen little more than the walls of this house for the past two, between working from home and lockdowns. Time to find some new walls to stare at, if only for variety’s sake.
