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.

The four-letter word in paint

Painting your house is similar to having a new baby. Years pass, and you forget just how tough it was at the time. You forget the mess and the smell and the discomfort and remember only the happy glow of the new and fresh.

This is why couples have more than one child, and it’s why I volunteered last summer to paint my old house.

Painting may be the lowest common denominator of home projects. You might not be able to replace a window pane or service your own furnace, but you can slap paint on something, given the opportunity.

Of course, such relative simplicity can be deceiving, leading us to tackle much more than we should. Unrealistic goals lead to slip-ups like the dingy window frames in one bedroom at our house, missed when we last painted six years earlier.

Most of our interior was a color I called "What-were-we-thinking Pink," though the paint company called it "Windsor Rose." It went on our walls the color of Pepto-Bismol and dried to a pale pink that looked fine as long as no light shone directly on it. We’d lived with that paint for six years and two small boys, and it was time for a change.

My wife and I visited the home improvement store and leafed through samples and took home paint chips and finally settled on a light taupe called "Renoir Bisque." Other finalists included "Sandrock," "Foggy Day" and "Gray Moth." For the woodwork and trim, we chose an enamel called "Pure White."

We also bought rollers and brushes and pans and sponges and yardsticks and masking tape. We considered one of those power rollers, but the house isn’t that big and, heck, we’d only use it every six years.

We got everything home, and I began doing a little prep work every day -- scraping and spackling and sanding and scrubbing.

Six years before, my wife and I had painted the house together, but this time I was doing it mostly alone. I’m a househusband now, and I had endless days to concentrate on the paint job and really do it right.

It took a month.

Partly, that’s because I could only apply paint when the boys were at Grandma’s house. Kids and wet paint don’t mix. Partly, it’s because I spent an enormous amount of time edging everything in miles of masking tape, trying for crisp edges around the ornamental woodwork. I went back to the store three times for more tape. My motto: Tape it now or scrape it later.

But the main reason it took so long is that I needed to rest a lot. House-painting is like doing aerobics all day long -- up and down and back and forth, now s-t-r-e-t-c-h. You use muscles that normally get to just lie around in your arms and legs and shoulders, filing their nails and smoking cigarettes and waiting for an alarm call. And, let’s face it, I’m not as young as I used to be. It had been six years since I'd last hefted a roller.

In paint, I learned, there is pain.

Despite the aching muscles, painting can be a Zen experience once you find your rhythm, graceful in its smoothness and economy of movement. In fact, it might be almost enjoyable if it weren’t for the paint itself. Why does paint have to be a liquid, subject to the vagaries of gravity and spill? Most of the time, I was covered in Renoir Bisque.

It didn’t help that the latex paint appeared a radioactive lavender when it was wet and I was blithely coating my house with it. It lightened as it dried, ending up just the right shade of taupey tan. I think paint manufacturers make it happen that way to drive us all crazy. Their little joke.

It's been nearly a year now, and the place still looks pretty good. But already I find myself thinking: Maybe down the road, say six years from now, I’ll be up to doing it again.