Let’s get one thing straight, right here, right now. Your home, while you live in it, is for you, by you, about you. Nobody but you and the people you love who live there with you. Your home is for YOU, not the next buyer. As such, all the nice things you do for it and to it should also be for you, by you, and about you, and never for the next family who will live there. This is your place! It’s where you dream, learn, grow, become. So it’s important to honor yourself – your whole self and nothing but yourself – in its decor and design.
In a previous home, we were a very young (broke) family. We were trying to be financially responsible (which was in complete discord with my decorator’s heart). So our living room sat empty for the longest time. It had a big bay window facing east that looked out onto the snowcapped Cascades in the distance. Through that window, I saw some of the most breathtaking pink and orange sunrises I have ever seen (Texas mornings notwithstanding).
Yet we spent most of our time at home in the back of the house. Back where the kitchen met the family room, where Ben could watch Madagascar (love me some King Julian!) for the 7th time that day while I cleaned up breakfast and cooked dinner simultaneously, and where the space accommodated the chaos of our sweet kiddos and the messy necessity of Goldfish crackers and applesauce quite nicely.
Obvious Lessons Learned by Green Homeowners
As time went on, I became wistful each time I’d head up or down the stairs past that beautiful, lonely space. When we finally stashed enough cash for furniture, an entirely new realm (adult space!) opened up to us. We had a sofa! End tables sat on either side of it. Chairs and a rug were ours. Lamps and apothecary jars full of pretty vase fillers sat on top of a sofa table. Draperies finally framed our beautiful sunrises! And the clouds parted and the angels sang.
Imagine two grown-up kids in a candy store. That was us, all wide-eyed and amazed at ourselves. (Note, Tom may argue that I’m mis-representing him here, that it was “just furniture,” but this is my post.) One night, we sat in our new living room together, marveling at our new surroundings. We legit looked at each other and said, “What the hell took us so long?!”
For two weeks after that, I got up early every morning to watch the sun stretch up over the pink-white peaks of our mountains. And those were some of my happiest, quietest, most grateful moments in that home. Moments I would have missed out on had we not made a point of fully making our house work for us. Solitude was hard to come by in those days, and I regretted not having done it sooner. This may sound like a big, “Well, duh, you guys. Furnish your house.” Noted. But we truly didn’t realize what we were missing out on until we gave ourselves the chance to use the space and love it.
Tips from the Real Estate Pros
Every time we’ve worked with a real estate broker to sell a home, we’ve received all sorts of tips on how to appeal to the subconscious of potential buyers who walk through. Said more simply, it’s smart to pull out all the stops to pull on people’s heartstrings as they walk through your home, so that it feels like home to them, too.
When we moved out of our first home, our broker advised us to leave a basket of apples on the counter for our open house; the familiarity and the color would be happy and welcoming to buyers. He also told us that if we could manage to bake some cookies just before leaving for the day (sure, no problem – let me just whip out a batch of yumminess with my potty-training toddler running around while my husband wipes all of said toddler’s handprints off the front windows!), it wouldn’t hurt. The smell of something warm and delicious, he said, would be comforting and inviting, and would subliminally make people want to stick around a little longer.
For our next move, an entirely different broker offered up a new set of tricks. She suggested we feng shui the place up a bit, to appeal to a wider variety of buyers with a positive flow of energy. She had us plant colorful annuals in our flower beds out front, which we had designed intentionally with perennials and evergreens to keep it as low maintenance as possible. And while she didn’t ask us to bake cookies, she did ask us to leave a subtle candle burning, again because people often associate the scent of “homemade” with comfort and happiness, which translates subconsciously into people falling in love more quickly with your home. (Including yourselves.)
Let Home be for You, Not the Next Buyer
When we came back after a long day out in soggy Seattle with a tired toddler, the smell of chocolate chip cookies was like a great big hug to welcome us back to warmth and a soft landing. Having intentional spots of color, in fruit or in flowers, both outside and in, made it look like we really loved and cared for our home. And it made us look at each other and go, “Ummmm…we need to sell our house more often!” JUST KIDDING. But we did have another obvious moment of dumb realization. It was as though it had never occurred to us to do those things before. In all honesty, we had done it all before, but we had always done it for somebody else.
The moral of this story: Your home is for you, not for the next buyer.
Do what you can right now to make your home comfy, welcoming and refreshing for yourself, so that you can enjoy it while you still live in it. It can be demoralizing to put your blood, sweat and tears (and checkbook) into a space, not to mention your heart and soul, just to hand it over to someone else. Unless, of course, you flip houses for a living. But assuming your home is yours for the foreseeable future, learn from our missteps and moves to upgrade your joy. Redo the bathroom. Plant the flowers. Bake the cookies, add the extra pillows and light the candles. Then sit right down in the middle of it all with your momentarily fingerprintless windows and love the hell out of it. Relish the sweet satisfaction that this beautiful place is yours, by you, for you, because of you.
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