Best Staged Plans
Authors: Claire Cook
TO MY READERS
IN READERS
(now or before you know it)
AND OUR FARSIGHTED FUTURE
I’ve been absolutely terrified every moment of my life—
and I’ve never let it keep me from doing a
single thing I wanted to do.
—
G
EORGIA
O
’
K
EEFFE
Contents
Sandra Sullivan’s Best Staging Tips
A Conversation with Claire Cook
O
KAY
, so I accidentally wrapped my reading glasses in one of the packages I mailed.
“It could have happened to anyone,” I said to my daughter, Shannon.
“Wow, that’s pretty lame. Even for you, Mom.” The all-knowingness of her three and a half months of marriage reverberated through the phone line.
I ignored it. “If you get them, just mail them back, okay, honey?”
The minute life starts getting easier, your eyes go. So the time you once spent looking after your kids is now spent looking for your reading glasses. I hated that.
“Good one, Sand,” my best friend, Denise, said when I called her next. “Remember that time you left Luke at the pediatrician’s office in his baby carrier?”
“Your point?” I said.
As if summoned by the decades-old reference, Luke lumbered into the kitchen and poured a cup of coffee. He nodded once, either by way of thanks or a belated good morning, then turned and thudded his way back down to the bat cave.
“Good morning to you, too, honey,” I yelled after him.
I was packing up our old life in order to drag my husband kicking and screaming into a new one. The rest of the morning’s boxes were still sitting on the kitchen island, so I rifled through them quickly. Foam packing peanuts fluttered to the floor like a dusting of snow. As soon as each box proved itself glasses-free, I tore a strip from a mammoth roll of packing tape and sealed it shut.
It’s not like I didn’t have other readers. There were at least a dozen pairs scattered throughout the house. Somewhere. But this pair had been my hands-down absolute favorite. Midnight blue with subtle black stripes and a little extra bling from some silver detailing on the sidepieces. The perfect strong rectangular shape to offset my swiftly sagging jawline. Unique in a world of boring drugstore glasses, they were my go-to readers whenever I needed to see anything smaller than a bread box. The only thing about them that drove me crazy was their tendency to fall off my face when I leaned forward.
It turned out to be their fatal flaw.
Once I’d determined that they’d left the premises, I’d retraced my steps to the post office. The man who’d waited on me earlier was a total jerk. So, of course, wouldn’t you just know he’d still be working when I walked back in.
A kind of angry arrogance radiated from this guy, maybe fueled by the inadequacy of a spindly gray ponytail that petered out inches after it began. “Anything liquid, fragile, perishable, or potentially hazardous?” he’d always ask in such a bullying tone that he’d manage to convince me I was a closet pyromaniac and he was the first to catch on.
I thought my best bet was to strategize so I’d get the nice woman at the other end of the counter. I counted the people in the single line, divided by two, and gave up my place to the person behind me.
Somehow I still got the mean guy.
“Anything liquid, fragile, perishable, or potentially hazardous?” he sneered.
“Yeah,” I said. “Apparently my life.” I laughed my best laugh, the one designed to melt the heart of even a great big bully of a jerk.
His flat eyes scanned me like a bar code. “This. Is. Not. A. Joking. Matter.” He took a slow step back and reached for something under the counter. An alarm? A can of Mace? A double-barreled shotgun?
I held up one hand like it might actually protect me. “Sorry,” I said. “Sorry, sorry, sorry. It’s just that you’re not going to believe what I—”
His hand was still under the counter. The crowded post office had gone quiet. I seemed to have fallen into a
Seinfeld
episode. The guy behind the counter was the post office Nazi. I was Elaine. At least I hoped I was Elaine and not George. Or even Newman. Oh, God, please don’t let me be Newman.
“Answer. The. Question.”
“No,” I said.
One gray eyebrow shot up. “No? You’re refusing to answer the question?”
“No,” I said. “No is the answer to the potentially hazardous question.”
The whole room was staring. I tried to imagine a graceful segue to getting my packages back just long enough for a quick peek inside. No post office rules about how once you send them, neither rain nor snow nor sleet nor reading glasses can impede your packages’ journey to their final destination. No extra charge for double mailing. Ponytail Guy would even help me tape my packages back up with federally funded tape.
I shook my head. “Never mind,” I said. “Final answer.”
ONCE I GOT HOME
I made my phone calls. I took a moment to shrug off the post office fiasco and to grieve the at least temporary loss of my favorite reading glasses. Then I moved on.
I turned on the TV to keep me company while I searched for backup cheaters. I found a hot pink pair (what had I been thinking?) in the junk drawer in the kitchen. They were a bit weak, maybe a 2.25 or 2.50, but they’d do in a pinch. I found two pairs of narrow, full-strength readers, still in their tubular cases, no less, at the bottom of my unbleached canvas grocery bag. One was kind of a dull bronze and the other more of a flat pewter. I wasn’t really crazy about either of them.
A little retail therapy seemed like the next logical step, so I sat down at the kitchen island and fired up my laptop.
Best deal on large quantity of funky but not over-the-top bargain-priced reading glasses to replace lost favorites and if at all possible to make midlife woman feel like her pre-vision-impaired hip self again
I typed into the Google search bar. Amazingly, it fit.
I paused, my index finger hovering over Google Search. I moved it incrementally to the right and contemplated the single-result-producing button. I’m Feeling Lucky, it said.
It was more than a slight exaggeration, but I pressed it anyway.
SEND YOUR FRUMPY READERS PACKING! Pitch your boring and outdated drugstore readers and become a fashion-forward reading spectacle! Pack a pair in your purse, tote, car, office, home, and vacation getaway bag, and you’ll never be blindsided again. Set includes 8 pairs stylish reading glasses in fashionista colors, along with 1 pair reading sunglasses in root beer with tortoise highlights, plus 9 individual color-coded drawstring pouches and 1 designer polypropylene water-resistant case. That’s 19, count ’em, 19 individual pieces for an astonishing $29.95. Retail value $169.99. Styled in the U.S.A./Made in China.
It seemed too good to be true, but who cared. The price was right, and they looked great in the photo, so the worst that could happen was that I’d wear each pair a couple of times and dump them when they fell apart. The truth was that I thought husbands and houses should be built to last forever, but the less sturdy nature of everything else could be a good thing. I mean, who wanted to be married to an outdated set of dishes or a dining room table you were completely over but couldn’t afford to unload because you’d spent a veritable fortune on it? Cheaper, easily replaceable items could be the spices of life.
From across the room, the television clicked into my consciousness. I glanced up. A blond reporter who looked about twelve was standing in front of a cookie-cutter house. She was surrounded by an assortment of broken chairs and three Easy-Bake ovens. Two overflowing Dumpsters were parked in the driveway like cars.
She took a quick, shallow breath. “A four-month search for a local woman came to a grisly end this week when her husband spotted her feet poking out from under a floor-to-ceiling pile of filth.”
A cat sprang on top of one of the ovens. The reporter jumped. “Police say they searched the house behind me many times, even bringing in cadaver dogs, but they were unable to locate the body among the endless layers of clothing, knickknacks, and rotting food.”
I gave my disheveled kitchen a quick glance, assessing the potential challenge to cadaver dogs.
The camera pulled back, and the reporter introduced an expert on hoarding.
“Two to five percent of Americans are chronic hoarders,” the expert began. “But that doesn’t let the rest of us off the hook. The problem for so many of us . . .”
I waited. The flavor-of-the-month reporter nodded her highlighted head encouragingly. Or maybe just to speed things up so she could breathe again.
“. . . is that we’re drowning in our stuff. We can’t find what we have. So we buy more. We can’t remember what we have. So we buy more. We’re emotionally attached to what we have, and we can’t let it go. And still we buy more. We can’t get past all the accumulated stuff in our lives to get to our own next chapters. We’re stuck, and until we get rid of all the stuff that’s holding us back and stop the endless accumulation of stuff, stuff, and more stuff . . . we’ll stay stuck.”
“Thanks for sharing,” the reporter said. “And now a word from our friends at Big Lots.”
I clicked off the TV, but I couldn’t shake the image of that poor dead woman with her feet sticking out from under a pile of junk, like some new twist on the Wicked Witch of the East. This was it, the exact message I needed to hear at the exact moment in time I needed to hear it.
I wouldn’t just pack up the mess and relocate it. I’d weed out my life. Eradicate. Eliminate. Streamline. Simplify. And once the dust settled, my next chapter would sprout up to greet me like a sunflower on a fierce summer day.
But first I leaned over my laptop and ordered nine new pairs of reading glasses, just so I’d be able to see my way out.
V
OLTAIRE SAID
that illusion is the first of all pleasures. As a professional home stager, I’d have to say he was spot-on. Home staging is all about illusion. It’s the sleight of hand that infuses an ordinary house with heart, with panache, with
soul
. After the purging and scrubbing, the organizing and arranging, it’s the single perfect strand of pearls for that little black dress. It’s the art of creating a mood.
The way you live in your house and the way you sell it are two completely different things. Proper home staging will ensure that your home appeals to the greatest number of buyers, thereby selling more quickly, even in a down market.
