Meet the Comparables

Yesterday I went with an agent to check out houses that fall roughly in the same range as our house (although it still hasn't been priced). The idea was for me to see what's out there, what's selling or isn't, how much and what kind of work people are doing or not doing before putting their house on the market, and most important, how much should we charge? I didn't get an answer to my question—so much is uncertain right now—but I did discover that I'm plenty opinionated when it comes to home decorating.

The first house was a Victorian-era brick affair with lots and lots of rooms, including a ground-level apartment with a separate entry. The owners had done a great job spiffing up the place—muted paint colors, a new kitchen with simple cabinets and soapstone counters, and a wood deck out back with a view of the Catskill mountains, if one's chair were carefully placed.

After that, things got ugly.

A house with a generous wraparound porch that promised a lot delivered a dreary vestibule painted the darkest possible shade of olive green. The kitchen had been redone, in defiance of the period architecture, with 70s track lighting and vinyl flooring. The bedrooms had that "asymmetry is interesting but where will I put the bed" configuration, and in the finished attic we found not just tin ceilings but tin walls, which, I learned, cause vertigo, at least in this experimental subject.

There was a mansion that had the feng shui of a fun house, with passages leading to dead ends, pillars without purpose, and a kitchen counter jutting from the stove at a 45-degree angle that gave my hip a bruise just to look at it. The furniture said, well, screamed actually, "Don't you dare touch me!" Nothing personable had been left to help a visitor envision living there. Such is the fallout of the methods of staging. More on the loathesome practice of staging homes in a post to come.

One house with tons of square footage had it oddly distributed: a tiny vestibule that made me duck opened to a grand but useless hall lined with metallic, tropically themed paper from the 70s (19-, not 18-); a suite of parlors painted espresso brown—I'm being nice by calling it espresso—were unable to be illuminated (for some reason the switches weren't working), so they hid whatever treasures they may have offered to make up for the wall-to-wall olive green shag. I like olive green in the right place at the right time, but I don't think a potential buyer should be wandering through a home saying "I can't see a thing in here; is that a door or a book case?"

Then there was the place that hadn't sold after months on the market. The other realtors had been beating their heads against the wall trying to figure out why. My guide and I walked in, turned to one another and said, "It's the smell." In the kitchen, a loud belch erupted from the plumbing. I made a note, "the sink has something to say." A house with a strong odor—whether from bleach, a burning scented candle, or in this case, I suspect, a toxic chemical cleanser—has something to hide. So does a house with wall-to-wall rugs. Why are people so enamored of woolly, dust-loving fibers under their feet? I left with a sore throat and that Matrix sense that the house was an illusion disguising some horrible truth we'd need a red pill to get to the bottom of.

If this sounds like a cranky rant about people's rotten taste, it is. Since I'm flapping my gums about this, here's how I think a house should be prepared inexpensively for market: repair cracks and prime the walls that need it. If painting, light, airy shades show a house off best, and my guess is, neutral is preferable. There's a dark shade of purplish-red that is quite common in decorating, it's a color that comes with an odor, or maybe that's my own synaesthetic response, but imagine a cloying, commercial smell, let's call it Country Berry Pie; it makes me nauseous—especially in bathrooms and in wallpaper strips people inexplicably love to paste under perfectly beautiful moldings. When I see this color I'm done. A few steps away from blue toward yellow on the red scale, though,and I'm fine. Maybe everybody has these sensitivities; maybe they govern the pace at which a home sells.

Color aside, working lights and plumbing are most appealing; I'd go so far as to say: necessary. As for the bayberry tea lights some folks leave mysteriously burning to welcome visitors, I wish they'd save them for a romantic evening. They make me gag.