People Live Like This? (or Adventures in House Hunting)

If I had to make a list of favorite weekend activities, house hunting would rank somewhere near the bottom — higher than watching Amanda comment on hundreds of her high school friends’ Facebook walls for hours on end, but lower than allowing Amanda and Olivia to paint my toenails. In other words, somewhere near the bottom third of the list.

Don’t get me wrong. Thinking about what the future holds, imagining the possibilities, and just the prospect of owning a new place are all exciting things. But the problem is, house hunting can be seriously depressing. No matter how it looks on television.

You watch those shows on HGTV — programs like Property Virgins, My First Place or House Hunters — and you envision yourself — just like those eager-eyed mom-jean-wearing (the men) and sweatshirt-donning (the women) Kentucky couples — nabbing your move-in-ready dream McMansion for just under $200,000, making the seller pay your closing costs AND agree to clean your pool in the nude for 12-months just for the privilege of handing their keys over to you and your spouse. But then, in the real world, your realtor treks you around to a dozen Long Island shanties that sell for $800,000 and, at best, haven’t seen renovations since Lyndon B. Johnson was president.

Still, house hunting (as a process) benefits from one saving grace — one thing that makes it bearable, turns it into a mild form of guilty pleasure entertainment, and caters to the armchair voyeur’s perverse sense of morbid curiosity. You get to see how other people live. And that, in itself, is worth the price of admission. Sure admission is free (until you decide to buy something, of course), but seeing how all these random strangers let their freak flags fly behind the privacy of closed doors is worth every goddamn penny.

This is just a quick rundown of some things I’ve observed while slinking through other people’s homes:

Clown Town & Other Design Disasters: Well maybe the town was perfectly normal but this one house looked like it could only have been decorated by a clown – lots of bright colors and pop art flourishes, even a puppet or two. Other strange design choices (that might not have seemed so strange when they were chosen, but c’mon people it’s 2010 – let’s replace those shag carpets):

• Well, shag carpets of course, generally in shocking shades not often found in nature and less often found in tastefully appointed modern homes.
• Pink / orange / yellow counter tops and tiles.
• Those tacky carpeted toilet seat covers.
• Mauve everything – yes, everything.
• In one powder room, a pair of alien hands reaching beseechingly from the wall, holding a pair of neatly folded hand towels.
• An honest-to-god vintage stove that was leaking enough gas to blow up the block.
• A faithful replica of Molly Ringwald’s bedroom from Pretty in Pink, complete with a killer New Wave record collection and hastily snapped photos of Andrew McCarthy.

Architectural Oddities: To each his own I suppose, but in our hunting we have seen a number of head-scratchers:

• Sliding doors that open into a garden. Not onto a garden path or to a patio that offers prime viewing of a garden, but directly into the plantings, offering no way out but to tromp across the mulch, shrubs and flowers.
• As bad as that was, how about a newly renovated home with an attached garage accessible only from outside the house, a lovely backyard but no way to access it other than leaving by the front door and walking around outside, plus (for the incontinent among us) a dining room with its very own half bath.
• Two massive wooden closet doors. Doesn’t sound so weird when I put it like that, but I should point out that these doors went only halfway to the floor (stopping a good 3 feet above the carpet) and opened onto a large crawlspace suitable for harboring underage Thai sex slaves.

Creepy Collections: Dolls mostly. But also anything emblazoned with the words “Bless Our Home” or meant-to-be-reassuring-but-actually-quite-ominous Bible verses. In one house, an inordinate number of little Gravy Master bottles. Not 100% certain this last one qualifies as a collection, so much as signifies an insatiable hunger for roast beef dinners.

That Which Has Been Left Behind: Belongings are often odd and awkward to others, but sometimes it’s the relative lack of belongings that makes something stand out. I’m talking about houses where it seems the furniture has been cleared and the family has moved on, but for some reason one thing or another has been left behind:

• Two fully assembled, copiously laquered jigsaw puzzles, framed and hanging on the walls — one of a wizard casting a spell, the other of a group of gray wolves howling at the moon (think Three Wolf Moon but with maybe an extra wolf or two.)
• Creepy ancestral portrait showing an older woman with bare breasts. Now, to be honest, this painting was in the attic of one home that was clearly still occupied by its family – and I have no idea whether the woman depicted in the picture was really related to the family (let’s just say I’d be shocked if she was a professional artists’ model), but it struck me as some kind of family heirloom that the current generation found awkward and inappropriate for the living room walls. They probably tucked it into the attic, not even thinking that one day some snarky sonofabitch would be climbing the stairs to scope out their storage space.
• An old man. OK, being completely honest, I suspect the old man actually lived in this one condo we saw. But as he shuffled forlornly around a mostly empty living room and then settled into the one piece of furniture — an oversized chair with cupholders built into the armrests — I couldn’t help but consider whether or not his son and daughter-in-law had simply tired of him and moved on to a new life without him.

Don’t Even Get Me Started on the People. The awkward homeowners who sit slumped on their sofas or buried in bed sheets (yes, we’ve seen people – mostly kids but still – hunkered down in their beds) while total strangers tromp through their homes, doing their best not to appear like they’ve had any outside human contact for years. I suppose these homeowners are better than the overly eager tour-givers. We went to one house where the owner felt compelled to narrate our walk through the rooms with the most minute of details about the walls, windows and floors. We went back to the house a week later because, frankly, it was a pretty nice place and she proceeded to do the same thing, with no recollection that we had been in her house just 7 days earlier. Her performance was all the more bizarre given that her hushand (slumped on the sofa) and daughters (buried in bedsheets) steadfastly ignored our presence altogether.

Note to self: the next time I sell a house, I will be certain to plan plenty of away-from-home activities so that I am not sulking in my living room like some creepy looky-loo every time a potential buyer takes a look.

And last but not least, the thing that inspired me to write this post. My number one favorite house hunt sighting…

The Piece (of Shit) de Resistance: Yesterday, while touring a reasonably well-appointed home on a nice quiet suburban street, we discovered a turd in the master bathroom toilet. Not a straggling floater that escaped the flush but a full-fledged load accompanied by all the accoutrements. I suppose nothing says “Welcome to your New Home” like a stranger’s feces, so we gamely continued our walk-through of the house and blithely discussed the property’s pros and cons (interestingly a giant, steaming turd left to greet prospective buyers was listed as neither a pro nor a con.) I’m happy to say the other toilets were devoid of substances the human body voids.

Anyway, I know some of you must be thinking, who is he to judge? You’re probably right. It’s easy to sit here upon an armchair made entirely of elk antlers (untrue), feet resting upon a massive pile of dirty laundry (true), wearing my last pair of almost-clean pajama pants (true) , tapping away on my laptop (true) as I sip human tears (untrue) from a gold-rimmed chalice (untrue), poking fun at other people’s houses (true). But at the end of the day, it’s my blog and I can say what I want. Right?

Besides, here at Chateau Verdineau we almost always remember to flush the toilet.

Tags: greg verdino, hgtv, house hunting, humor, Life, other people, Rants, verdino