Best Staged Plans Read online

  The couple we bought it from had been using it as a ministry for wayward boys. That explained the pulpit, and possibly even the shotgun shells. The owners had tried to get tax-exempt status as a church in Massachusetts, and when they couldn’t, they’d decided to move to Vermont.

  Our Realtor assured us that the house would be empty and clean before the final walk-through prior to the closing. We never even got a final walk-through. When we showed up, the sellers simply refused to let us in the door.

  The Realtor called a lawyer. The lawyer called the sellers. The lawyer called our Realtor back.

  The Realtor turned to us. “Crazy people can get away with a lot of things,” she said. “Do you want the house or not?”

  Everything we owned had already been loaded into a moving van. We’d just closed on the sale of our three-bedroom ranch an hour before. It was the way we had to do it. Without the money from the first house, we couldn’t buy the second.

  “How bad can it be?” I said.

  We went to our second closing of the day. After a lot of arguing, and a minisermon by the minister, the Realtor got us a six-hundred-dollar escrow to cover the cost of cleaning and removing anything that hadn’t already been removed by the sellers. Twenty years ago, that was a lot of money.

  But not enough. The movers managed to cram everything we owned into the garage. We piled ourselves into Greg’s mother’s rumpus room until we could make our new home livable, all four of us sleeping on one big mattress on the floor.

  Each night we had a painfully repetitive dinner conversation with my mother-in-law. No matter how we tried to redirect the conversation—current events, local gossip—she always brought it back to two topics: the kids not eating their vegetables and the kids not sitting still at the table.

  “When you were their age, Gregory, we could take the four of you anywhere. You’d sit at the table like little angels.”

  “Ma,” Greg would say, “what are you smoking?”

  “Don’t smoke, Grammy,” Shannon would say.

  “Don’t you remember, Ma? We used to slide down the banister in our cowboy boots, and jump on those big dusty drapes at Grammy and Grandpa’s house and try to swing across the room on them? Grandpa would chase us around, yelling, ‘I’ll get you little bastards,’ and Grammy would back him up with a frying pan.”

  Luke would look up from furtively rolling his grandmother’s salty canned peas one by one off the tray of his high chair. “Bastards,” he’d say.

  “See what you just taught him,” Greg’s mother would say. “My children never swore.”

  “Damn right we didn’t,” Greg would say.

  Everybody but my mother-in-law would crack up. And the next night, we’d do it all over again.

  After dinner, Greg would head back over to the new house to get a little more work done. I’d give the kids their baths and put them to bed. Then I’d hide out in the rumpus room until Greg came back, a prisoner in someone else’s home.

  One night, just for something to do, I looked up rumpus in an ancient dictionary I found on the knotty pine bookshelves. Noisy clamor. Disruptive commotion. Confused disturbance. Din; tumult; stir; fuss.

  We’d entered our rumpus years.

  CHAPTER 5

  I UNSCREWED the last kitchen cabinet door and stood back to take it all in. If eyes were the windows to your soul, then doorless kitchen cabinets were the portholes to your life. The last two decades lay before me, totally exposed.

  The white bowls with the turquoise and chocolate stripes that we’d bought at the Dansk factory outlet on a trip to Kittery, Maine, were so old they were back in style again. I lifted them up and sponged the shelf clean, then arranged them into a snazzy little triangle.

  Way in the back of a cabinet, I found a box of artificial sweetener packets, circa 1990-ish. I’d bought it for a diabetic neighbor of the same decade who used to stop by for coffee, and no one else had ever touched it. I hadn’t thought of this neighbor in years, and hadn’t even been all that crazy about her, but I had a sudden urge to track her down and send the rest of the box off to her. I pitched it instead.

  I packed up a collection of Danish modern stainless serving trays to send to Shannon. They’d go perfectly with the sleek, contemporary look she was shooting for in her new house. They’d been wedding presents, but I had no urge to ever serve another appetizer again. If I changed my mind, I’d find something else to put them on.

  I’d spent the better part of my life accumulating things, and now I couldn’t let them go fast enough.

  I worked my way through another cabinet, dividing the stuff into boxes labeled SHANNON, LUKE, DONATE, PITCH, and PACK. I returned just a few items to the cabinets—things we couldn’t live without and things that would show nicely when a prospective buyer inevitably peeked inside.

  I dropped twenty-nine perfectly good, if slightly crusty, cabinet knobs into a plastic Stop & Shop bag and tied it in a double knot. They weren’t awful, but new knobs bring instant sparkle to a kitchen, and I’d already found some great replacements. I dropped the bag into the DONATE box. Who knew, my old knobs could be somebody’s big find at the Vietnam veterans’ charity thrift shop.

  I took a deep breath and kept going. Mismatched soupspoons. Three teapots. Dog dishes that had outlived our much-loved series of family dogs. A melon baller. Two ice cream scoops. A bread maker. A waffle maker. A hot dog steamer. A George Foreman grill.

  I was a long way from a guest appearance on Hoarding: Buried Alive, but I could relate to the emotional lure of things. It required vigilance to keep them from taking over your life. Those ice cream scoops might remind me of hazy, lazy summer afternoons, all four of us just back from the beach, when the kids were at their cutest and mint chocolate chip or cookie dough was the most earth-shattering decision of the day.

  But I could let go of the scoops and still keep the memories. Sometimes I even advised my clients to take a photo of an object before getting rid of it. I crisscrossed the two scratched plastic ice cream scoops—one turquoise, one pink—on the counter and ran upstairs to grab my camera.

  I knew the drill. When deciding whether to let something go, there are two important questions to ask: Have I used it in the last year? In the unlikely event that I ever need it again, could I replace it?

  I rummaged through another cabinet. My mother’s prized collection of Tupperware, including a cake carrier and a deviled egg tray. A stuffed Betty Crocker doll from my grandmother that I’d tucked in with the cookbooks. The Reddy Kilowatt pin I’d earned at my first cooking class when I was six.

  We had a theme: ridiculous things you are emotionally attached to. The trick was to whittle down the collection as much as possible. I pulled out another box and labeled it CRAZY. Anything I could fit in here I could keep. I hadn’t baked in years, and Shannon would only laugh at me if I shipped it to her, so I dumped the Tupperware into the DONATE box. If there was a heaven, my mother was now one pissed-off angel. I tucked the doll and the pin into the CRAZY box.

  I pulled out the junk drawer and set it on the counter. I reached into the tangled mess, pitching the dried-out markers, the twisted paper clips, the keyless key chains.

  “Little Jack Horner” flashed randomly through my mind as I reached in again, but instead of a plum I pulled out my old mood ring from high school. I couldn’t imagine how it had ended up in the junk drawer. I sat down in a chair, stretched the adjustable silver band out as far as it would go, and forced the ring over my knuckle and onto my finger.

  “Aww,” I said out loud.

  Back in high school my friends and I had taken our mood rings seriously. We checked in with them all day long to tell us what we were feeling. Am I in a good mood today? Do I have a crush on Michael Sylvester?

  We trusted our mood rings the way we’d trusted our Ouija boards and Magic 8 Balls in junior high. But mood rings were far more sophisticated. There was even actual science behind them. The clear glass stone in the center of the mood ring was filled with liquid
crystals that were extremely sensitive to heat. The crystals twisted their position in response to your body temperature. The position of the crystals determined the wavelengths of the light that were absorbed. When those wavelengths were reflected back, the stone appeared to change colors.

  If the clear stone of your mood ring turned blue while you were wearing it, that meant you were happy. Purple meant passionate. Green indicated calm. Amber signified uncertainty. Black said you were seriously stressed.

  Funny that I could still remember all this in such detail, but ask me to figure out a basic algebraic equation, or to conjugate the simplest Spanish verb, and I drew a complete blank.

  Luke thudded into the kitchen and grabbed the last of the cabinet doors. He and Greg were arranging them on twenty-nine empty liquor boxes they’d picked up at the package store and spread across the side lawn. The plan was to scrub down the cabinets and drawer fronts and then freshen them up with a coat of white spray paint.

  Never spend the money to replace your kitchen cabinets before you sell. Just spruce them up. It’s simply not worth the cash outlay, and you can’t predict the cabinet taste of the next owners. For all you know, you could spend tens of thousands of dollars just to have the new residents rip them right out.

  “How’s it going?” I asked.

  Luke grunted. His eyes squinted against the unfamiliar morning light.

  I grabbed some cleaning supplies and followed him outside. “How’s it going?” I asked again.

  “Great,” Greg said. He took two of the cabinet doors from Luke and balanced them on matching Stolichnaya boxes. I hoped the people driving by our house didn’t think we’d actually consumed all this liquor.

  “Good,” I said. I held up a spray bottle. “Okay, don’t forget, start with this Simple Green. If that doesn’t work, go right to the trisodium phosphate and bleach.”

  “So much for the environment, huh, Mom?” Luke said.

  “I’ll make it up to the environment,” I said. “As soon as we get rid of this house.”

  Greg checked his watch discreetly. “Got it. We’ll jump right in as soon as we take a little break.”

  “Yeah,” Luke said. “I’ve got a couple clients I need to check in with.”

  I noticed that Greg was wearing his newest running shoes. The bottom edge of a sweat-wicking running shirt peeked out from under his ratty old T-shirt. Luke was already hunched over his iPhone, texting.

  Luke worked from home as a bug tester for several small video game companies. As near as I could tell, his goal was to work exactly enough hours to pay the tiny portion of the college loans that were in his name as well as the meager rent we were charging him for his own good.

  I’d suggested that since all he did with the rest of his time was play video games anyway, he might as well rack up some hours and save for his own apartment or even a down payment on a town house. He’d nodded pleasantly. It was impossible to tell whether he was working or playing, since the electronic sounds reverberating up from the bat cave were identical. I figured there was at least a fifty-fifty chance he was simply humoring me.

  Luke was smart and sweet and even handsome, with Greg’s shiny brown eyes and athletic build. Somewhere underneath the oddly groomed facial hair, the heavy boots, and the wardrobe of geek T-shirts and pants made shapeless by dozens of pockets was a star waiting to be born. My hope was that pulling the bat cave out from under him would speed up the birth process.

  “Listen, you two,” I said. “It’s a one-day job. You’ve got to get the cabinets washed, wiped down, and then sprayed with two light coats of paint before the temperature drops below fifty degrees. And you have to finish early enough that they’ll dry and you can get them back into the house before dark. Then after dinner, if all three of us work together, we should be able to screw them back up tonight. We can save the new knobs for tomorrow.”

  Luke’s phone beeped. “New level hot off the presses,” he said as he headed for the bat cave.

  I looked at Greg.

  “Don’t worry,” my husband said. “Just leave it to me. I’ve got it under control.”

  “If I had a nickel for every time I’ve heard that one,” I said as I walked away.

  I went right back to sorting through the cabinets so I wouldn’t lose my momentum. I got rid of boxes and boxes of tea—chai, chamomile, peppermint, Red zinger. I dumped a package of coffee filters from the second-to-last coffeemaker we had before the one we had now. I threw out a drawerful of old maps that had become obsolete with the invention of MapQuest, along with the instruction manuals for two toasters and a microwave we no longer owned.

  The box for Shannon was full, so I took a break to write her a little note. I tucked it inside and taped up the box.

  I peeked out the kitchen window to check on the cabinet progress.

  Two of the liquor boxes had tipped over and thrown their cabinet doors to the damp March ground. The Simple Green was exactly where I’d left it, and the roll of paper towels didn’t look any smaller.

  Greg and Luke were MIA.

  I didn’t really need to check in with my mood ring to know what I was feeling, but I looked down anyway. A furious black stone stared back at me.

  CHAPTER 6

  I COULDN’T REMEMBER if Shannon had ever voiced an opinion about the trays I was planning to mail off to her today. I was pretty sure she’d like them, but if there was one thing I’d learned as the mother of a daughter it was that you never, ever knew.

  I pulled up her name on my speed dial.

  “Hey,” she said on the first ring.

  “Hi, sweetie. Do you want those Danish modern stainless trays? You know, the ones Dad and I got for our wedding?”

  I could hear the wheels of her brain turning from Atlanta. “I don’t know. Would you want me to have them if I were a client? Or is it purely sentimental, and you just don’t want to be the one to dump them?”

  Shannon had been asking questions like this since preschool, so I was used to it by now.

  “Yes or no,” I said.

  “Okay, yes. Thanks. Listen, I can’t talk. Later.”

  “You’re welcome,” I said, even though my firstborn was long gone.

  Denise called before I even had a chance to put my BlackBerry down. She skipped right over hello. “Who’s your BFF?”

  “Uh, give me a minute. It’s right on the tip of my tongue. Carol Flanagan?” I switched the BlackBerry over to my other hand, opened the refrigerator, and started making a grocery list.

  “Oh, please. That little trollop? She slept her way through the entire boys’ debate club junior year.”

  I shook my head. “They were probably just really convincing. So what’s up? You’re not calling to cancel on me, are you?”

  “No, I’m calling to tell you how lucky you are to have me and how excited you’ll be when I tell you what I just did for you.”

  “Milk,” I said.

  “What?”

  “Oh, sorry, I was writing.” I opened a carton of eggs for a head count.

  “Begging won’t get you anywhere,” Denise said. “You’re just going to have to wait till lunch to find out.”

  “Yogurt,” I said. “Hey, do you think that probiotic stuff is for real, or is it just a load of crap?”

  OUR CURRENT HOUSE was only a hop, skip, and a jump to the post office, but our letter carrier’s route started at the farthest point and worked its way back. It drove me absolutely nuts that I could watch the post office jeep drive by our house with our mail in the morning, but I couldn’t get my hands on it until sometime between 4:00 and 5:00 P.M.

  Over the years I’d tried flagging down a series of letter carriers, with and without bribes ranging from doughnuts to lemon pound cake I’d pretended to bake myself. They all took the food but said regulations prevented them from giving me my mail. Who makes these regulations, and wouldn’t their time be better spent on things that make sense?

  Eventually I gave up and rented a post office box with guaranteed
delivery by 10:00 A.M. It seemed a small price to pay for my sanity, and I enjoyed the short walk. I’d pop in and out the side door to a room with floor-to-ceiling mailboxes and unlock an ancient box numbered 609 with a big brass key. There was a sorting counter and a recycling bin, so I could even get rid of my junk mail before I headed home.

  Even though I’d solved the issue of getting my mail, there was another problem I couldn’t touch. The post office was a design disaster. I’d actually brought this up once, casually, to the postmaster, and she’d simply asked me if there was anything else she could help me with today. As a home stager, I felt an almost physical pain that I could see the post office’s shining potential but couldn’t do a thing about it.

  I imagined people in other professions had their version of my pain. A personal trainer confronted with underdeveloped quadriceps or a flabby set of abs. A landscape designer gazing at a field of weeds. A plastic surgeon assaulted by the sight of Heidi Montag’s nightmare breasts.

  Staging is all about highlighting strengths and downplaying weaknesses. Sure, it’ll help you sell your house, but maximizing your environment will also help you live your best life. I mean, who wants to see the ugly stuff?

  Everything about the post office was wrong, from the stark entry to the cold gray institutional walls. Window boxes filled with cheerful annuals would work wonders, as would sunny yellow paint on the interior walls. Even the fonts on the signs behind the registers were unwelcoming. I mean, it’s enough that you have to charge an arm and a leg for postage. At least use friendly fonts—rounded with serifs—to announce the bad news. Georgia is a good choice for a friendly but professional serif font.

  And clutter, don’t get me started on clutter. The overflowing gray metal wastebaskets. The pile of Express labels toppling over into the Priority labels’ territory. I mean, what would it take to find some cute wicker baskets? And the wall art, ugh. Those yellowed wanted posters with the curled edges weren’t doing anything for anyone. Seascapes by local artists in bright contemporary frames would make all the difference.