New Perspective on Work Space

When you see your house on the web, you can't help but feel self-conscious. So, house-after-staging is actually the best circumstance for this unusual level of disclosure. This photo is one-half of my office. What you cannot see is another desk and and a chair. The room dimensions? 30 x 13. You'll agree that there's not a lot of furniture for a room this size. The fuller story: before the stager did her work, there were 8 chairs (total), an air desk (in addition to the 2 desks retained), a third bookshelf, and 4 rolling carts. I am adjusting to the new work space. Slowly.

© 2010 Mary Bold, PhD, CFLE. The content of this blog or related web sites created by Mary Bold (http://www.marybold.com/, http://www.boldproductions.com/, College Intern Blog) is not under any circumstances to be regarded as professional, legal, financial, or medical advice. Or education advice. Or marital advice. Or even a tip.

Living Generically: Life After Staging

Having been staged (the house, that is), we expected to feel a bit plain. Or even generic, like a hotel room. The above photo is where I am right now. It's plain. It's generic. But here's the real what it's like: living in a staged home is like living in a hotel room with Sherman.

Sherman's our dog. When we are in a hotel with Sherman we must keep soap tucked away. Trash cans tucked away. Clothes hung. Papers in briefcases. Cords hidden. And, of course, absolutely no food or cutlery left in sight.

© 2010 Mary Bold, PhD, CFLE. The content of this blog or related web sites created by Mary Bold (http://www.marybold.com/, http://www.boldproductions.com/, College Intern Blog) is not under any circumstances to be regarded as professional, legal, financial, or medical advice. Or education advice. Or marital advice. Or even a tip.

Relying on a young friend

The stager (for the house that's going on the market) have us many instructions but a very short list of purchases to make. This was lucky.

Even so, we didn't want to assume that our boomer generation eyes would be up to the task. (Generational taste. And interest. Those are the problems.) So, we asked a young friend to do the shopping for us. A few bedside lamps, a chandelier for the kitchen table, and fluffy towels in just the right color.

She did a good job.

© 2010 Mary Bold, PhD, CFLE. The content of this blog or related web sites created by Mary Bold (http://www.marybold.com/, http://www.boldproductions.com/, College Intern Blog) is not under any circumstances to be regarded as professional, legal, financial, or medical advice. Or education advice. Or marital advice. Or even a tip.

Staging. Stripping. Eliminating.

This wall is now actually a highly decorated space in our home. Its spines (part of the dome ceiling) are built-in design, in contrast to the vast blank spaces that we now call home.

You see, the stager came. Only younger boomers understand staging. Older boomers missed that introduction to the real estate industry—but if they relocate now, they're going to meet a stager. In fact, I think that a visit from a stager should be mandatory in preparing a house for sale. Not so much for the staging as the stripping.

You see, a real stager does not necessarily match the picture we get from TV. Those "selling" shows bring in stagers who put pizzazz in the properties. Our stager insisted that pizzazz doesn't sell. Rather, it interrupts the buyer's train of thought and brings too much attention to the furnishings (or the current owner). Of course, if a buyer falls in love with the furniture, the stager has the opportunity to make a profit, along with the realtor, but my guess is that's not so common.

I have come to appreciate what our real-life stager did: strip the house of personality. Virtually all traces of us are gone. And about 1/3 of the furnishings are gone. What's left is lots of floor space, lots of blank canvas.

The reason I think that staging should be required is that it sews up the seller. If you go through this elimination process, you invest time and then cannot imagine bringing the old stuff back home. So, you're committeed to sell. Good for realtors.

In the meantime, we are clearing to the level of the photo above. And getting ready to tackle the garage. Oh, my.

© 2010 Mary Bold, PhD, CFLE. The content of this blog or related web sites created by Mary Bold (http://www.marybold.com/, http://www.boldproductions.com/, College Intern Blog) is not under any circumstances to be regarded as professional, legal, financial, or medical advice. Or education advice. Or marital advice. Or even a tip.

What can you get for $2 anymore?

For an incredible $2/hour, you can get play care. (Get it? Play care instead of day care.) It's for your dog: off-leash outside play with other dogs. That's not so common in the kennel world. I decided on the facility even before I knew the price. When I saw this photo on the web site, I laughed out loud and called them immediately.

For the record: I receive no compensation from the Paw Spaw for mention of the facility. In fact, I give the Paw Spaw money (for letting Sherman attend play care).

© 2010 Mary Bold, PhD, CFLE. The content of this blog or related web sites created by Mary Bold (http://www.marybold.com/, http://www.boldproductions.com/, College Intern Blog) is not under any circumstances to be regarded as professional, legal, financial, or medical advice. Or education advice. Or marital advice. Or even a tip.

Self-Storage: An Urban Tale

In my growing up years, putting something in storage meant taking it out to a barn or a chicken house. (Most things never came back out, which is just as well. I can conjure up the dust now, 40 years later.) My experience with commercial storage was limited to taking wool coats to a cleaners for seasonal storage. I stopped that during college. And then I went a long, long time before I needed to seek out a storage place other than my attic or garage. That time was last week.

My inexperience was obvious. I had to ask elementary questions like, "what kind of items need to go into climate controlled storage?" It finally wasn't the temperature factor that made me select two inside units, it was the agent's explanation that anything in an outside unit ends up collecting a lot more dust. More than your garage at home. Well, there's that dust issue again.

After a round of Internet comparison shopping, I visited a single self-storage facility and latched on to two small units with "first month free" rather than a large, full-priced unit. Did I visit the facility that looked like the best deal (from the Internet)? Nope. I went to the one that is most convenient to our grocery store and dog park. Familiar path and maybe an efficient path.

And what did I learn? To get two locks (for two units) that use the same key. And to label boxes with boring codes. You see, the manager once lost some valuable items in a storage facility because she carefully printed "Antiques" on selected boxes. Those were the only boxes the thieves took. (At a far-away facility, not mine, of course.)

The self-storage business is down a little due to the economy but holding its own as people preserve their house stuffs even if they are between houses. Baby boomers will help this industry in the next few years as retirement and relocation decisions increase in number.

© 2010 Mary Bold, PhD, CFLE. The content of this blog or related web sites created by Mary Bold (http://www.marybold.com/, http://www.boldproductions.com/, College Intern Blog) is not under any circumstances to be regarded as professional, legal, financial, or medical advice. Or education advice. Or marital advice. Or even a tip.

Where would you live if...

Even though our mobile society is not so mobile anymore, retirees are. And the leading boomers who officially retire in 2011 (if they're not already out of their jobs due to lay-offs) will make us all look mobile even if only a fraction of them start traveling or moving. They will also talk about it more than most people do....

So, the #1 question becomes, Where would you live if you could live anywhere? Some typical answers are back home, where family is, and where it's warm.

Tom Bold and I chose the climate route with a sub-answer of where it's warm on the way to where family is. But there's another sub-answer and Tom gets credit for articulating it.

"You know, we've always had two priorities for neighborhood. We sure don't, now."

Those priorities were quality of schools (that affected one of our home purchases) and length of the commute to work (that affected all of our home purchases, four of them). Now? Except for a very slight interest in resale value, and I'll emphasize slight, we don't much care about the schools. The commute to work is even less of a consideration. Commuting now centers on Internet access, not road access.

One commute is of interest: number of minutes it takes to reach an off-leash dog park. Happily, with 18 dog parks, the greater Las Vegas area can be called dog-friendly.

What drives us, then, toward a neighborhood choice? So far, it's what is missing that calls to us: sidewalks. The best morning walks with a dog happen off pavement. So, it's just possible that the house hunting will be defined by concrete.

© 2010 Mary Bold, PhD, CFLE. The content of this blog or related web sites created by Mary Bold (http://www.marybold.com/, http://www.boldproductions.com/, College Intern Blog) is not under any circumstances to be regarded as professional, legal, financial, or medical advice. Or education advice. Or marital advice. Or even a tip.

Looking for Neighborhoods

Visiting a potential next community means learning about neighborhoods as much as looking at houses. So, when a realtor says, you don't want to live over there... well, that's where you end up at the end of the day.

As I drove through that not-recommended neighborhood of Las Vegas, I found myself saying, How bad can it be? There's an Olive Garden.

© 2010 Mary Bold, PhD, CFLE. The content of this blog or related web sites created by Mary Bold (http://www.marybold.com/, http://www.boldproductions.com/, College Intern Blog) is not under any circumstances to be regarded as professional, legal, financial, or medical advice. Or education advice. Or marital advice. Or even a tip.