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.
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