Living on Stage

The towels in our bathroom belong to someone else. The stager we hired put them there. After we de-cluttered our house, the stager swooped in and made it look fancy, the way a house has to look these days to sell. We put our mis-matched dressers and garage-sale book shelves in storage. We got rid of our half-broken Ikea stuff. We packed away our photographs and books. The stager, Heidi, came with loads of comfy chairs and large vases of artificial flowers, lots of lamps and throw pillows. There are now 26 throw pillows in our house; two weeks ago there were three. She put nice towels in our bathrooms, gave us an acceptable credenza for our TV, and put red martini glasses in our living room. Because, if you buy our house, you'll just loll around drinking cosmos in that living room every night.

So, the towels in our bathroom belong to the stager, and I can't use them. MY towel is stuffed under the sink, which means whenever I need it I have to scoop it out of the vanity. The toaster oven now lives in the garage, and our kitchen radio spends most of its time in a cabinet. The only books left here are the ones I am actively using for work and a selection for the girls (which are tucked in a drawer in their dresser). There's also a coffee table book of Andrew Wyeth landscapes, but that belongs to the stager.

Every night before bed I pick up and put away absolutely everything, and every morning after breakfast I clean. I wipe and sweep and dust and even mop if necessary (note: Mop n' Glo may be the most magical substance on Earth). My house has never been this consistently clean and uncluttered, and it's so much no fun work to keep it this way. But, the reports from Realtors tell us that the house is "showing well," and if that means we have a better chance of selling it quickly and for a decent price, it'll be worth it. Here are some photos of what the place looks like all sparkly clean decorated with Heidi's stager's touch.