Open House

A neighbor's house recently went up for sale. He'd spent months emptying it, working on it, cleaning it, and since I've never been inside, I'm curious. There are, of course, glam photos posted on the realtor's website, but photos don't reveal workmanship details -- what they do show seems odd, considering all that pre-sale prep work: Nothing updated. Styles, appliances, finishes and fixtures, common to the nineties when that house was built, remain. What had he been doing in there?  Well, the deck is new. Pretty, too. But ... pine? Why, in our very damp and shaded locale, replace an entire deck in pine?

Open Houses (especially one up just your own street) offer intriguing opportunities. So what if you're not on the market? Take a glimpse of other worlds, parallel universes. People fancy the strangest things, not just decorating and remodeling, but designing and building in the first place. Supposed refinements often reflect unfathomable taste. And while some such mishaps are fixable, they are rarely negotiable. What, you don't love the master addition? The unique tilework? The exotic countertops? Well, it's all in the asking price. So add the annoyingly unjustifiable expense of undoing/redoing a recent upgrade to your calculations.

Always fun to look though.

Before deciding to build our next home from scratch, we considered buying an existing house -- ideally, one that was finished to our liking and move-in ready. But there's always something (no matter how beyond-affordable the place) that just has to go, must change, seems outlandish, is unacceptable. And we'd been there and done that: bought a house that was move-in ready, but not finished to our taste. So every year, we changed something, living through the process. Until it was all us. Will the next owner be its undoing?