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Bacon is truly the new bread when hosting an open house

By Mike Morin - For The Telegraph | Sep 3, 2018

I’ve moved 15 times in my life, and I did not grow up in a military family. I worked in radio, which has a similar transient rate as the U.S. Armed Forces. After five years in my current house, the itch has struck again. Anyone need a condo?

What’s wrong with this picture? Lady Baba and I downsized from a 2,600-square-foot home five years ago to make our life more compact. Got a 1,900-square-foot condo. No kids. Unless you count our 17-pound blowhard watch dog. It was an empty nester’s dream until it wasn’t.

“We have nine grandchildren now,” Barbara reminded me. “We need more space for them.”

“Are they moving in with us and you are now just getting around to telling me?” I asked.

Despite the perception that there is no inventory for Realtors to sell, I’m here to tell you there is. For us, the bad news is that we’ve spent the summer with numerous showings and open-house dates. Still no takers, unless you count the woman whose dog exceeded the 25-pound weight limit for pets specified in the association’s by-laws. Her dog is 60-pounds. She made an offer, but we lost the sale on the technicality.

There is good news: Our house has never been cleaner. When we receive word that buyers are coming to tour the place, we go into robo mode with Windex and paper towels. I actually don’t care if this joint doesn’t sell for another year. I’m finally in the routine of cleaning, vacuuming and waxing floors. The place looks like a million dollars every day. We’ll take less than that, of course. Make an offer.

We’ve been house shopping during this time, expecting we could time the sale of the condo and get a new place. We looked at a place on Canobie Lake. Lost it. Found the most amazing home in Bedford with a pool and a master bedroom the size of Costco. Lost it.

Back to the drawing board. Here’s another side effect of a prolonged home marketing period. You can’t cook stinky food. Sometimes with just a two-hour notice, you have to be sure the condo doesn’t smell like fried onions from the night before.

“You want bacon for breakfast, Barbie?”

“OK. That should pass the sniff test if we have buyers coming by today,” she’ll respond. Some people leave warm, fresh muffins during open houses. We leave bacon and anything else that’s aromatic from the Atkins Diet. That whole fresh bread smell thing is so 1990. Bacon is the new bread.

Add to that, Realtors suggest removing family photos and other personal effects from display when selling your home. We went rogue, however, by having a painting of our fluffy guard dog in the living room. Plus, it was suggested we hide the scale from view in the bathroom.

In the meantime, I’m living in a house with no toothpaste spatters on the bathroom mirror and a scale that doesn’t snicker at me every day.

Contact Mike Morin at mikemorinmedia@gmail.com or follow him on Twitter at @MikeMorinMedia. His column runs the first, third and fifth Tuesdays of the month.

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