Fun with typos

More hilarity from Craigslist real estate ads:

--"Just steppes away from the beach!" (That sounds really far.)

--"Bedroom is large enough to hold California King Bad."

You can now start referring to me as King Bad of California. Thank you.

Crowing from the (almost) empty nest

You know what I haven't been doing lately? Back-to-school shopping. Bwah-ha-ha-ha-ha.

Our youngest started this week at Shasta College, but he didn't need any new school supplies or clothes. He had a pen, and he wore his usual hippie rags. We threw some money at him as he headed out the door, and that was about it. He stays at our house some nights, but that's temporary. He's pretty much on his own.

As most of you know, Kel and I are trying to take advantage of our emptier nest by selling our beautiful home in Redding, CA. (Price reduced to $400,000! For slide show, click here.) As soon as the house sells, we're moving to a place by the beach in Santa Cruz. Why? Here's why:

(I don't know the photographer, but he's got lots of awesome aerials at his website. Check it out.)

But enough gloating. For you poor souls who still have kids in school, check out the Home Front archives for a few laughs, including this column about back-to-school shopping. Enjoy!

Buy our empty nest

In case you missed it over the holiday weekend, we lowered the asking price of our Redding, CA, home to $419,000. What a deal!

Palm trees, flowers, views and an inground pool. Four bedrooms, two baths, three-car garage. To see details (and cool slide show), click here.

Fun with Craigslist

In anticipation of our big move, I'm spending way too much time looking at rental properties on Craigslist. Because people do their own copy-editing on Craigslist, you sometimes find hilarious mistakes, such as the recent ad that began, "Basque on your sun deck. . . "

Here's today's find. In an ad for a nice apartment were the words "ceramic tile threw out the kitchen."

Ha-ha. We all know that's wrong. They mean "thrown."

Buy my house

As many of you know by now, we've put our home in Redding, CA, on the market. The real estate folks put together a neat slide show, and you can see it here if you're interested.

Our younger son graduates from high school on June 4, and our nest will be empty. Kel and I are planning to move to Santa Cruz, CA, and live by the beach. We both work at home these days and can live anywhere, so we decided to do the coastal thing, at least for a year or two.

Our house, with its palm trees and swimming pool and mountain views, has been the California Dream for the past seven years, a great place to raise the boys. But now it's time for a different dream. Just the two of us. A smaller place. A down-sized lifestyle. And no guest room.

Staging area

With home prices in the basement and the economy in the toilet, it's not the best time to sell your house, but circumstances sometimes force a move.

The first step is unloading your current home, and that brings us to Today's Important Real Estate Tip: To sell for a decent price, your home needs to look better than it ever did when you were actually living in it.

Real estate experts call this "staging" the house for sale, and they use the word strictly in a show-business sense, to mean creating a pretend world of order and style.

Basically, it means cleaning the house to within an inch of its life, accomplishing all previously-ignored repairs and making the place look as much as possible like a photograph out of Metropolitan Home magazine.

(When reading Metropolitan Home in the doctor's waiting room, parents may seem to be marveling at the modern, sterile rooms presented there. In truth, here's what they're thinking: "No children in that house.")

Staging your home isn't as easy as it sounds. First of all, your house is filthy. Yes, it is. You may think it's clean, but once you start rearranging the furniture and stowing stuff, you'll find crud you never knew was there. Secondly, you (and your children) have a lot more junk than you think. Thirdly, you'll see your home with fresh eyes, with all its shortcomings: faulty wiring and balky drains and jelly fingerprints and dappled carpet.

You've been living with these shortcomings for years, and likely have gotten where you don't even notice them anymore. But you'll see them now and, if you don't, the potential buyers will.

Selling your house boils down to this: People -- strangers -- come into your home and examine it closely. Your job, as the seller, is to persuade these people that your family does not live like pigs, and that everything is in good working order. You want these strangers to imagine themselves living in your house, arranging their own furniture in your familiar spaces.

If they can picture themselves in your home, they might buy it and you can get back to packing your junk into recently-emptied liquor boxes.

How to properly "stage" your home?

Let's start with the exterior. You want your home to have "curb appeal," which means you must freshen up the outside, tend the grounds, do something about those yellow dandelions that dot the lawn like dropped eggs. If the house's paint is peeling or you've got an old Chevy up on the blocks in the yard, you might need to hire professional help.

Inside, every surface should be cleaned off. Put away your knickknacks and bowling trophies and family photos. Potential buyers want to picture their own stuff on the shelves. If you can somehow get photos of their families, you might want to artfully arrange them somewhere.

The most common approach to hiding junk is to stuff everything into closets. Showing your house becomes a horror movie: "Don't Look in the Closet!" To keep potential buyers from opening closet doors, you may need to employ a basketball-style man-on-man defense. ("Put a body on somebody! Now!")

Once all your junk has been carefully hidden, you can go all-out in the cleaning department, rounding up dust bunnies and scrubbing toilets and scraping grime out of corners.

Work at it hard enough, and your house eventually will be sparklingly clean, and tidier than it's ever been before. The trick becomes keeping it in that condition while people parade through day after day. You thought it was hard to keep the house passably clean -- clean enough to keep the health inspectors off your neck -- wait until you try for Metropolitan Home every day for weeks.

Somewhere during this process, you will have two predictable reactions: 1) Why didn't we keep the house this nice when we were living here? And, 2) Since the current house has turned out so well, maybe we shouldn't move after all.

If you find yourself falling into that trap, take the one sure remedy: Go look in the closets.