How HGTV is Driving Home Sellers to Drink

House Hunters. Love It or List It. Curb Appeal. Flip or Flop. Clearly all pretty popular shows on HGTV.  HGTV, in case you actually have a life and don't watch as much TV as I do, is the home improvement channel. It's insanely popular, particularly among those looking to buy or sell a home. These shows teach you how to update and stage your home.  They are also causing me to chase my emergency anxiety pill with a half bottle of Voga every time someone comes to see our house. Now there is a survey out there somewhere that rates moving up there with marriage and divorce as being among the most stressful life events. And in my highly professional opinion, HGTV has done more to up the stress level of buying/selling a home than the 2008 crash ever could.

When my parents sold their first house in 1983, showing your house was easy.  You made sure the beds were made, the dishes were done, and that the lawn was mowed.  If you had kids the toys went in the toy box.  No big deal.  Since there was no internet or centralized showing service, you were lucky if you got a phone call ten minutes before a broker arrived with a client.  And guess what? Houses sold.

Today the expectations for the home seller is out of control.  First of all, you must pack up at least half of your belongings, if not more. You must remove all of your family photographs. You must box up all of your knicknacks. You must remove all of your kitchen items from the kitchen counter. And don't even think about putting these boxes in your basement or garage, because buyers will be looking at these! Your oven, microwave, and refrigerator must be spotless because buyers will look in these!  You must hide your hampers and dirty laundry but don't even think of putting them in closets, because prospective buyers will open those!

Basically HGTV has trained homebuyers to want to see houses that do not look lived in. Buyers today expect perfectly staged homes, completely spotless and neutral. Now don't get me wrong, I always prefer to see a house that is not lived in.  To me it's just uncomfortable to walk through someone's house, with all of their things there to see. (And even worse if the buyer hangs around!) But that's just house hunting. Cost of doing business, so to speak. People sometimes have to sell houses while they still live in them.  Deal with it and look past it and look at what is really important.

Now, there are four people still currently living in my home.  50% of them are under the age of 4. Trust me, I do absolutely everything I can to make sure that my house is clean and neat and in great shape for showings.  But to leave negative feedback on my house because I have a shelf full of board games in the basement storage room and tools in the garage is just absurd. I have stuff.  And I am not going to pay for a storage unit for my stuff so that my storage space in my house is empty.

I'm selling a house with two brand new bathrooms and a new kitchen.  It has a new roof, furnace and AC, and hot water tank.  It has new carpet and a new retaining wall. For Christ's sake people, look past the boxes of books and excess kitchen stuff that is neatly arranged on shelves in the basement. It seems like the people buying houses today would rather see empty open space than have the knowledge that they are going to be ten or twenty years away from making any significant repairs. And I blame that on Sabrina Soto!

People, these are houses.  And sometimes real people live in them. Don't make an already stressful situation worse. HGTV needs to stop encouraging the bar to be set so high. There is no reason that you should pack up your entire life just to sell your house.  There's a difference between having your house "show ready"  and "tv show ready."   This is reality, not reality tv.

For Better Living...

0 empty calories/processed foods
1 hour of exercise/reading
2 liters of water
3 cups of green tea/green juice
4 mental and stretch breaks
5 things you are grateful for 
6 am meditation
7 minutes of laughter
8 hours of sleep
9 thousand steps daily

I came across this countdown on Instagram the other day.  With a little bit of research, I traced it back to Brenda Strong, who is a yoga teacher, fertility expert, and actress, best known for portraying Mary Alice Young on Desperate Housewives.  It's a little self-help ish and a little New Agey, and I don't usually have much tolerance for such things. But this list, for some reason, kind of stood out to me and made me think.  It's been a stressful few weeks and it doesn't look like life is going to get much less stressful.  The main contributing factor is my stress is how so many things are out of my control right now.  I can't control certain things going on at work and I can't control how fast my house sells. But I can control me, and it seems like lately other things are controlling me, as opposed to me controlling me. This countdown (count up?) seems like a way that I can take back some control, and maybe make myself feel better in the process.

0 empty calories/processed foods 

I swear, I have the best of intentions with food.  I do.  I know what is good for me and what is not.  I also know that at 7:00 at night after a full day of work and an evening of taking care of my kids, food takes a backseat. It's way too easy to just eat a bowl of cereal or frozen french bread pizza.  Definitely something that I can plan better and work on this summer.

1 hour of exercise/reading

Easy.  I'm almost always on the treadmill first thing, and I love reading.  Just have to keep it up.

2 liters of water

I'm really good at drinking water at work.  Not so much when I get home and my 6:00 Diet Coke just sounds soooooooo good. Something else that needs improvement.

3 cups green tea/green juice

In an effort to get myself to stop drinking a pot of coffee every day, I had already started drinking green tea.  I'm not crazy, I still have my two cups of black coffee first thing, but I switched to tea after that.  Green juice is harder because this is Ohio and the only place I can find it is on Chagrin Boulevard and I refuse to go there. But I will look into it a little more and see if I can find a way to make it work.

4 mental and stretch breaks

Easy to do, hard to remember to do. Thankfully it is summer and if it ever stops raining I can grab a friend to take a lap around the parking lot a few times a day.

5 things you are grateful for

My family, my friends, the fact that I have a job, the fact that I have a house to sell, the fact that I have the means to purchase another one, and the weekly Farmers Market where I can buy non-processed healthy ish cookies.  Look, I found 6 things!

6am meditation

I was quite the yoga person for a long time and I will admit that I have never gotten the hang of meditation.  If I sat quietly on the floor with my eyes closed at 6 am I would fall asleep.  Couple that with the fact that I tend to get lost inside my own head if things are too quiet for too long.  However, I have a commute to and from work everyday, and that is time that I can use to kind of think and straighten myself out, or just listen to music and not think about anything.  I'm going to read up on meditation though, it might be something I just need to figure out.

7 minutes of laughter

That's why God invented Youtube.

8 hours of sleep

Um, I have children.  But I guess there are ways I can do better.  I can go to sleep earlier, I can keep working on the whole sleep training thing with the little guy.  Progress, not perfection right?

9 thousand steps daily

Time to fire up the FitBit.  I wonder if this is in addition to my hour of exercise.  I'm guilty of sometimes being really lazy for the rest of the day if I have a good morning workout. But I have children to chase and a house to take care of and co workers who are always up for a quick walk, so maybe it is just a matter of putting forth a little more effort into moving around.

It looked like there was a #10, but it was cut off from the image and Google has not helped me find it, so I guess this is where I leave you.  Like I said, this is a little self help ish.  But maybe I need a little bit of that now, more than I would like to admit. I'm glad I found this and it's nice to have a list to work from in order to work on myself a little bit.  And maybe I can help someone else find some inspiration too :)

Decision 2016

Now here is my disclaimer.  The following is my opinion based on my own personal knowledge and experiences. If you disagree with me, that's fine.  Everyone has to do what they feel is right for their own family, and I am in no way judging anyone for what they did/plan to do.

I attended a birthday party with Amelia on Saturday. It was the first time I have ever gone to one with her.  Between the baby and being sick, Bill has been the one on the birthday party circuit. I don't know the parents of the kids in her class and I hadn't met most of them before. Despite my original dread of having to go to one of those bouncy places, it actually wasn't so bad.  I had prepared myself for all kinds of drama and mayhem, but thankfully nothing happened.

What I had not prepared myself for was every parent asking me when A's birthday was, and what I was planning to do about kindergarten. I didn't give it much thought at first, and actually I thought what they meant was "Are you sending her somewhere else, or are you keeping her at Lippman?". Since we are planning on moving but I have no clue where, I just responded that we weren't sure, since we were shortly selling our house and there was quite a bit up in the air.

I did not realize, until maybe the fourth person had asked me, the real question.  The real question was would I be sending her off to kindergarten after the next year of preschool.  I was stumped.  Now, I am not an educator, I know almost nothing about the education system or how things work, and Amelia is my oldest child.  I thought that things still worked the way they did when I was a kid. You went to preschool when you were 3 and 4, and after you turned 5 you went to kindergarten. If you were too close to some cutoff line, which I thought I remembered as being in September, you had to wait.  Case closed.

Oh how wrong I am.  I can sent A to "Transitional Kindergarten".  This is a class sort of in limbo between preschool and kindergarten.  I can send her to kindergarten at Lippman for a year, then I can send her somewhere else for a year of kindergarten.  Yup, two years of kindergarten.  Or I can just keep her home for a year, getting bored out of her mind while Bill and I, who are utterly unqualified to do so, try to homeschool her in some sort of way.  I'm sure there are other options too, but this is just what I picked up from the parents that I talked to on Saturday.

Again, I am no educator. I am no expert in early childhood education or child development. But these kids are just starting to turn 4. Kids change a lot in a month, let alone a year.  How can  you make a decision like that so far in advance? Why should you have to? A kid who is a little behind today can catch up in a heartbeat.  I shall use my own child as an example. My daughter was probably the last person in her class to be potty trained.  It was a nightmare. Nothing we tried worked. I was convinced that she was behind developmentally and was considering bringing in the experts.  Until one day she just decided she was going to do it, and that was that.  Period. Done.  I think ultimately it was a combination of her just deciding she was ready, and peer pressure.

So what do I plan on doing? Honestly, I'm going to let her ride out her last year of preschool. I'm going to have her take the kindergarten readiness test, and talk to her teachers, and if they say she is ready for kindergarten I am sending the kid to kindergarten.  She is smart, she likes school, she likes being around other kids. She can count, she knows her letters, she recognizes certain words. She listens to directions and sits still when she is told to sit still. Where remains to be seen, but unless a professional advises me otherwise, at that time, I'm not holding her back.  But the real answer is, she's not even 4.  There is plenty of time for me to decide that. I have a lot of things to stress out about right now, and my kid's kindergarten plans are not among them.

It's A Small World After All. Or The House That Built Me. Or The Houses That Didn't.

We're getting ready to put our house on the market.  A little new carpet, a little new paint, and a horrifyingly expensive retaining wall are all that stand between us being able to sell the old homestead and look for something better.  Much thanks is owed to our good friend and realtor, Jess, who has been a help in so many ways.  She's really gone above and beyond, and we aren't even listed yet.  I was very happy to be able to help her a little bit last week, and like so many other random things, the experience got me thinking.

A week or so ago, Jess came by to take a good look at the house, make some staging suggestions, and discuss the pricing and listing.  We got to talking, and she mentioned a listing that she is going to have shortly in Seven Hills.  Naturally, since I grew up there, I asked her where the house was in Seven Hills.  And naturally, when she told me Pleasant Valley Road, I asked her to be more specific.  And when she told me, I realized that it was a house I was very familiar with! The previous owners' daughter had gone to grade school and high school with me, and I had been to the house many, many times.  Jess asked me if I knew anything about the house, which is a really neat turn of the century farmhouse. Unfortunately all that I could tell her was that the house and grounds were really cool, which was not particularly helpful.  It had been a few years since I had talked to her, but I offered to try and get in touch with my old friend and see what she could tell us about the house.

The email address that I had didn't seem to get through, but I asked around among our mutual grade school and high school friends and I was able to get in touch. It was really great to reconnect.   She could not have been more excited to share the extensive history of her childhood home, as well as all of the renovations that her parents had done to house.  She also told me how much she loved that house, how much the house meant to her, and asked if it would be possible to bring her husband and children to see it.

That gave me what my sister would call "the warm fuzzies." I'm not particularly attached to the house we live in right now.  The neighborhood maybe, but not the house.  We didn't pick it out together and though we renovated it top to bottom, it was a stressful, expensive process that caused a lot of arguing and a lot of very quiet nights. It ran way over budget and way over the timeline. And a lot of stupid things went wrong that weren't even in our renovation plans. (Though the buyer of the house is going to be blessed with a lovely new hot water tank, furnace, and air conditioner.) The finished product is beautiful, but to me it's still just a house and I'm not sad to part with it.

I'm not attached to any house that I've lived in.  My last few years of living in my first Akron home were painful and traumatic and I couldn't get out of there fast enough. I still own it (thanks 2008) but I can't bear to be inside it.  I never cared for my childhood home in Seven Hills. That's nothing against my family, but the house itself just wasn't my style.  We moved to Seven Hills just before I started the first grade and I never really felt like I fit in there. Plus, it's been redone so many times that even though my parents still live there, it doesn't feel like the house I grew up in.  And I guess I was just too young to be attached to the house we lived in before that.

It's something to think about as we start seriously looking for our next house.  Do houses help shape who we are?  Is there something about them that is intangible, that can make a difference? Should I be looking at more than kitchens and dining rooms and whether or not there is wallpaper that I have to tear down? Do people build houses, or do houses, as Miranda Lambert says, build us?

Feel

I'm not a very openly emotional person.  I don't burst into tears when I fight with my husband.  I don't cry at movies and most of the time I don't even cry at funerals. Despite my tendency towards nostalgia, which many people would say indicates that  I am an emotional person, I tend to disagree.  When an intense emotional situation presents itself, I tend to think more along the lines of "What can I do here?" Most times, the answer is nothing.  And if there is nothing I can do, I move on.

That's not to say that I don't feel or get upset.  What I have always done in most emotionally intense circumstances is tell myself "Kate, you can be upset.  For one day." (Or hour or week, depending on the situation.)  A good example of this is a work conflict I had with someone a couple years back.  It escalated to the point that no matter what, there was nothing I could do to change the situation.  I could only change how I reacted to that situation. Basically what I did was I allowed myself that weekend to be angry, to hurt, to sort of let it all fester.  Monday morning I shut it off, blocked it out, and went out into the world like nothing happened.  I've done this kind of thing a lot throughout my life. But something happened yesterday that made me think that maybe this isn't the best way to handle the situation.

Another "emotional flaw" of mine (along with getting the giggles in serious situations and crying hysterically when I am angry at someone) is that on the rare occasion that the emotional floodgates open, it all comes out.  Kind of like on The Walking Dead, when the fence got weak at the prison and the zombies all pushed and pushed and knocked it over, flooding the yard.  On the rare day that it rains, it pours.

That happened yesterday.

I had a fantastic weekend in Orlando, which most of you know is my most favorite city in the world.  Through some bad planning, I was the last of our group to leave.  As the day wore on, I started to feel the letdown that happens whenever I leave Orlando.  I was on my way to Target with Tera (who lives there) and Dianna (who was staying the week, and had her family flying in just before I flew out.) Dianna glanced at me from the driver's seat and commented that I hadn't been this quiet in my whole life.  She asked if I was okay.  To which I replied, "Always am."  I started remembering all the times I had flown back to Ohio, leaving my sister behind.  As we unpacked groceries in her rented condo I was thinking how sad it was that we were all kind of trickling out of Orlando.  A bummer, but okay.

Then we drove to the airport, where I maintained my silence thinking about other things.  Before you all get appalled that I wasn't excited to get home to my kids, let me share that they weren't even going to be there.  They were snowed in at my sister in law's in Columbus.  So not only am I being separated from my favorite city, and leaving behind some of my favorite people, my own family isn't even going to be there when I get home.  Cue the tears, but I held them back.

When we got to the airport, I checked my bag and went with Tera and Dianna to meet her family.  Now, with the exception of my own family and a small handful of you Columbkille kids, no one has known me longer than Dianna and her family.  It was a happy reunion of hugs.  I was sad, but I was good. After they got their bags the goodbyes started, and I was okay until my 9 year old godson hugged me and asked, confused, "Where are you going?"Dianna jumped in and explained, freeing me to rush off to my gate in tears.

Thankfully Maureen was delayed getting out to Dulles, so she was able to more or less sort me out before she left. By this point all I want to do is get to my gate, get on the plane, and get home.  But that would have been too easy.  I had to fight my way through a pack of soccer hooligans and go through security a second time.  I forced myself to eat something so I wouldn't be starving when I got home and sat at my gate.  Remember what I said about my emotional floodgates? Here is where is really all went crazy.  I'm alone in the Orlando airport, appropriately upset, but then things that have absolutely nothing to do with the current situation start popping into my head and making things worse.

It's Lent.  During Lent in 1996, my grandmother died. A few days before I was going to show her my prom dress.  During Lent in 2005, my grandfather died, a few days before I was going to bring him pictures of my dog.  During Lent of 2007 my uncle died, before reading a very important letter from his daughter.  There were a few other things that popped into my head that are a little too personal to even write here, but they were losses and situations that tore me up inside. Think back to the beginning of this painfully long blog.  Are these things that still upset me because I only allowed myself to hurt from them for a few days? Is it impossible for the heart to heal from things like this if you put a time constraint on it?

Thankfully I got on the plane, and between my peanut M&Ms and my perky, Bible reading seatmate, I was able to pull it together.  I dug out my car, got myself home and swam through the snow into the house.  I fell into an exhausted sleep.

I'm not a mess right now, even after flooding my bathroom this morning. I feel pretty stable, compared to the hot mess I was yesterday, but as I was sitting in traffic this morning I decided that maybe the next time something happens that really hurts, breaks my heart or makes me really sad, I'm going to try feeling it all the way through.  Because if I don't lock it in a box after a weekend, maybe I don't ever have to worry about it breaking out and  ambushing me at Gate 110 of the Orlando airport.

Random Thoughts for a Friday

I was scrolling though Facebook this morning and came across a post that tagged a friend of mine.  I don't know the person that wrote the post and I don't know what his relationship is to my friend exactly, but it struck me as personal.  Deeply personal. Like "why the hell is he saying this on Facebook for the entire world to see?" personal. I'm surprised she allowed it, being one of the more quiet, private people that I know.  I don't get the feeling that he posted it with the intention of upsetting her, and I definitely think that he meant well, but damn.  If there was any question what he was feeling, we all have the answer now.

Controversy over what people post on Facebook is nothing new, it's been around as long as Facebook has existed.  My mom doesn't understand why my sister and I share pictures and my sister doesn't understand why I share my struggles with my children. (But believe me, someday she is going to be happy that there is a Lynette and a Dana and a Nicole and a Cheri and a Kelly to say, "Yeah, I totally get that!") What one person thinks is an intimate detail of their life might be common knowledge to someone else.  If you don't like someone's post, you always have the option of "hiding" it and if it truly offends you then you can report it. Post away, who am I to judge.

Facebook, when it's all said and done, is stupid.  I mean, it's fun a lot of the time.  I like pictures of kids being funny and seeing my friends on vacation and hearing about what is going on in their lives. It's neat to see what my grade school friends have grown up to become and to reconnect with my old roommates.   But when you stand back and look at it, it's silly.

But maybe some of the sharing isn't.  While I thought it was a little "TMI" to see the post that triggered this entire rambling, maybe the actual act of sharing isn't.  I hate not knowing things and if someone felt strongly about me, I would want to hear it from them.  Whether they thought I was an amazing friend, the most beautiful woman in the world, or a gigantic asshole, I would want to know.  Even though maybe we shouldn't be saying these things on Facebook for the entire world to hear,we should make sure that we tell people how we feel about them.

A few weeks back, somebody told me that they really enjoyed my Facebook posts.  That I made them smile at least twice a day.  I don't really try to make people laugh and I don't think that I am really that funny, but it made me feel good to hear that.  I felt appreciated.

We all know life is short, and nobody is guaranteed tomorrow.  I don't think very many people have ever wished that they hadn't told someone that they loved them.  Don't ever assume that someone knows what you think or how you feel. Whether you shout it from the mountaintops, send a PM, or call in an anonymous tip, let the important people in your life know that they matter to you.