Dave Barry’s Homes and Other Black Holes: The Happy Homeowner’s Guide to Ritual Closing Ceremonies, Newton’s First Law of Furniture Buying, the Lethal Chemicals Man, and Other Perils of the American Dream
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Americans have never been as fond of gardening as, for example, the British, who have, through centuries of puttering, managed to transform their little island into one of the world’s fourth-rate powers. Of course you cannot hope to achieve this kind of result in your own yard, but you will definitely find that for every hour you spend tilling the soil in the early spring, you will be richly rewarded with many more hours of fertilizing the soil in the late spring and weeding the soil all summer.
There are many different types of gardens to choose from, such as the flower garden, which consists of flowers; the vegetable garden, which consists of vegetables; and the Japanese garden, which consists of Japanese. But I myself have found that the best type, in terms of ease of maintenance, is the “garden consisting of ugly plaster statuettes.” Of course the type of ugly statuette you should choose depends on the climate in your particular area.
11
Getting Some Fool to Buy
Your House
No matter how perfect your new home seems when you first move in, you’ll gradually discover various shortcomings about it that get on your nerves, and ultimately you’ll come to hate it. This usually takes about two weeks. From that point on, you’ll be thinking about Trading Up.
Trading Up is the basic maneuver in real estate, dating back several million years to the prehistoric Catalytic Era. In those days, a typical couple would have to start out living in a small cave, but each day they’d go out and hunt for pretty stones, which they’d put in a pile, called Equity, in the center of their cave. When the Equity was big enough, they’d move to a larger cave, where they’d repeat the process and move to a still larger one, and so on until they moved into their Dream Cave, which was occupied by a saber-toothed tiger, or carnivorous humongous (literally, “huge payments”), which ate them. This is essentially the system we use today.
Before you can buy a new house, of course, you need to sell the one you’re in now.
THE BEST WAY TO SELL A HOUSE
The best way to sell a house is to walk down a city street and have a construction worker who is eating a sandwich fifty-five stories above you accidentally drop his lunch box so that it lands on your head in such a way that you are not seriously injured, but you do lapse into a coma, and you wake up four months later and the nurse says: “While you were in a coma, your house was sold.” This is also the best way to move, have a baby, and attend the opera. But things are rarely this easy. Usually you have to put quite a bit of effort into selling your house, starting with asking yourself the question …
DO YOU NEED A REAL ESTATE BROKER?
I touched upon this subject back in an earlier chapter, but I am quite frankly too lazy to go back and read what I said. Probably I said that there are pros and cons, because there almost always are, unless you’re talking about hemorrhoidal tissue.
On the one hand, if you sell your home yourself, you avoid paying a large commission; but on the other hand, you have to deal with people calling you up and coming around to your house all hours of the day and night, pestering you and giving you no peace. I’m not talking about potential buyers. I’m talking about real estate brokers, trying to get your listing. The only way to get them to go away is to sign a contract with them. Then you’ll never see them again.
Ha ha! Just kidding, of course. In the interest of fairness and decency and, above all, not receiving thousands of concerned letter bombs from the large and powerful real estate industry, let me state that I am sure that virtually all brokers out there are honest and highly competent professionals of the type regularly shown on TV wearing geek-style blazers. And even if it turns out that they’re not, I strongly advise you to use a broker, for the same reason that I’d advise you to pay somebody else to repair your automobile transmission, namely: No matter how incompetent or overpaid this person is, he or she can’t possibly screw things up as badly as you would if you did it yourself.
Before you sign a listing contract, you should talk to several brokers, to find out what they think your house is worth. What you want to be on the alert for here is a practice called “highballing,” which is when an unscrupulous broker deliberately overestimates the value of your house, just to get the listing:
BROKER: Mr. and Mrs. Jones, based on thoroughly walking around your living room here, I would estimate that the market value of your house is a hillion gazillion dollars.
YOU (suspiciously): Wait a minute. Our name isn’t Jones.
BROKER: Don’t worry about that. This is just a pretend dialogue in a humor book.
Once you’ve selected a broker, you’ll be asked to sign a standard contract, which will read as follows:
STANDARD REAL ESTATE LISTING AGREEMENT
The BROKER gets FIVE PERCENT.
Even if the BROKER doesn’t do SQUAT.
Even if the BROKER is off somewhere like MAUI, drinking EXOTIC TROPICAL DRINKS with names like KAMIKAZE KAHLUA when a WILLING BUYER, acting totally on his OWN, appears on the SELLER’S doorstep carrying a SUITCASE full of CASH MONEY, the BROKER still gets FIVE PERCENT.
In return, the SELLER gets to bitch about the BROKER at social occasions.
“My damned BROKER couldn’t sell mascara to TAMMY FAYE BARKER,” is the kind of snide comment the SELLER is allowed to make.
But the BROKER still gets FIVE PERCENT.
HOW MUCH SHOULD YOU ASK FOR YOUR HOUSE?
This is a very difficult question, but top real estate experts from all over the world agree that you should ask $127,500 and ultimately settle for $119,250. Also you should throw in the outdoor gas barbecue system with the charcoal-roasted spiders permanently bonded to the grill.
GETTING YOUR HOUSE READY TO SHOW
Once you’re signed up with a broker and have decided on an asking price, you need to fix your house up so it looks as though clean and tasteful grownups live there, instead of yourselves. Take a hard look at your house and furnishings, and ask yourself how they’ll appear to prospective buyers. Chances are that with a minimum of time and effort, you can make a number of dramatically superficial improvements. For example, suppose you have an ugly old sofa in the living room with a leg missing from one corner, which you’ve propped up with a copy of The Sex Lusters, by Harold Robbins. You’ll make a far better impression with an acknowledged classic such as Moby Dick, by Jackie Collins. You can also make a big improvement in the appearance of dirty, crayon-marked walls by buying a can of flat white latex paint and using it to stand on while you install a lower-wattage light bulb. And, of course, it’s always a smart idea to nail all your bathroom doors shut.
The overall effect you’re trying to create with these “homey” little touches is that your house is a warm, welcoming, and—above all—real kind of place, similar to the set of a 1962 situation comedy. You may want to create the impression that, at any moment, Ricky Ricardo might come bursting through the front door and get a great big welcome-home kiss from Mary Tyler Moore.
But the most important ingredient in the home-selling equation is you, the homeowner, because only you have a really intimate, detailed knowledge of the house; only you, who have lived there, know all the interesting little idiosyncrasies it has—all the special features and hidden “secrets” that make you want to dump it like a grocery bag full of armpit hair. Your job is to help your broker make sure that prospective buyers view these things in the proper light.
Unfortunately, brokers don’t always appreciate receiving help from sellers. In fact, most brokers won’t even want you hanging around when they show the house. They’ll let you know this by dropping little hints such as: “Please don’t hang around when I show the house,” and: “If you hang around when I show the house, I will kill you.” The broker is concerned that if you’re always hovering in the background like some kind of desperate street person, the prospective buyers won’t feel free to speak their minds.
There is some basis for the broker’s concern. The last time we sold a house, whenever I was in the room, the prospective buyers
would always describe everything as “interesting.”
“Hmmmm,” they say, looking at one of my Home Improvement Projects. “How interesting!” Meaning: “I can’t wait to tell the people in my office about this.”
So on the one hand, you don’t want to make the buyers feel uncomfortable, but on the other hand, you want to be available to explain features of the home that the broker might not be familiar with. The solution to this dilemma is to hide in closets when prospective buyers come around. By ducking from room to room just ahead of them, you’ll be invisible, yet still available in case a question comes up that the broker can’t answer.
PROSPECTIVE BUYERS: What is this greenish slime dripping from the ceiling everywhere and eating holes in the floor?
BROKER: Well, it’s, umm, errr, it’s, ah …
VOICE FROM CLOSET: It’s nothing to worry about!
PROSPECTIVE BUYERS (vastly relieved): Whew! Because for a moment there, we were concerned.
One major problem you’ll have to be on the alert for is when prospective buyers get really interested in your house and start to bring around …
HORRIBLE RELATIVES
Virtually all prospective buyers have horrible relatives with names like Uncle Roger who believe themselves to be experts in the field of home construction on the basis of their vast experience as thirty-year subscribers to Popular Mechanics. The prospective buyers will bring Uncle Roger around, and unless he is stopped, he will go into a testosterone-induced nitpicking frenzy wherein he finds hundreds of thousands of things wrong with your house. This is why it’s always a good idea, when you’re darting from closet to closet, to carry a garrote:
REAL ESTATE BROKER: And this is the master bedroom.
UNCLE ROGER: Well, this here is no good. These windows are only double-glazed. You want triple-glazed, plus you don’t want this kind of hinge. Plus you want more electrical outlets than this. Plus you want AAAAACCCCCCCCCKKKKKK!
REAL ESTATE BROKER: What on earth was that?
PROSPECTIVE BUYERS: Somebody just jumped out of that closet over there and garroted Uncle Roger.
AUNT LOUISE: Good.
Sooner or later, if you continue to engage in savvy sales techniques such as these, a buyer will become interested enough to make an offer on your house. The important thing, during these negotiations, is to remain calm. Do not become emotionally involved. Remember that even though you and the buyers are on “opposite sides of the fence,” the odds are that they are just regular everyday human beings like yourself, the only difference being that they’re trying to screw you out of all your worldly goods. So while on the one hand you want to be reasonable, in the sense of frowning thoughtfully at the buyers’ opening offer, you also want to be firm, in the sense of hurling it disdainfully to the floor and inviting friends and neighbors to help you spit on it.
Price is not the key issue in these negotiations. As I noted in an earlier chapter, the price you will ultimately settle on is the same one everybody always settles on, namely about five percent less than what you originally asked. Both sides know this, deep in their souls, but nobody really wants to just come out and admit it, for fear of appearing to be a wimp. So what you’ll do—everybody does this—is get into serious, heavy-duty negotiations over which side gets to keep various home accessories such as:
Ugly light fixtures
Dingy draperies, and above all
Minor grease-encrusted kitchen appliances that nobody really wants
These are the areas in which you want to be as petty as is humanly possible, in an effort to establish that you are a Tough Customer Who Will Not Be Taken Advantage Of. You want to stride in a forceful manner around your family room, cigar in hand, shouting instructions to your broker, such as:
“All right, they can have the Veg-O-Matic, but the sons of bitches are not gonna get the optional grape-peeling attachment!”
And:
“They want the ice cube trays?! Over MY DEAD BODY!!”
Using this aggressive approach, you should be able to retain possession of many of your prized home accessories, which will fetch you a handsome $1.85 when you hold your garage sale.
HOW YOU WILL FEEL AFTER YOU FINALLY SIGN THE AGREEMENT OF SALE
You’ll experience a feeling of almost unbelievable elation, even better than the way you felt the time Geraldo Rivera opened Al Capone’s vault on national TV and it was empty. This feeling will last for as long as seven tenths of a second, at which point you’ll remember the clause in the sale agreement, put there by some writhing little insect of a lawyer, that states:
The SELLER agrees that if, at ANY TIME prior to the actual sale of the house, SOMETHING BAD happens, like for example let’s say that on THE VERY MORNING OF THE SETTLEMENT, through NO FAULT OF THE SELLER, a TREE ROOT that for 127 years has been totally benign, suddenly, as if guided by DESTINY, decides to block the MAIN MUNICIPAL WASTEWATER LINE in front of the seller’s house, causing a veritable VOLCANO OF RAW SEWAGE to erupt right in the SELLER’S GUEST BATHROOM and quickly flow THROUGHOUT THE ENTIRE HOUSE while the SELLER is out at the SUPERMARKET picking up a bottle of WINDEX so as to put the last few finishing touches on the HOUSE so that it will be neat as a PIN for the NEW OWNERS, then HA HA the SELLER has to give the BUYER all his DEPOSIT MONEY back and the SELLER can kiss the whole deal GOOD-BYE.
So for the two months, or whatever, between the time you sign the contract and the time you actually close the deal, you’ll experience a condition that famed psychologist Sigmund Freud identified as Agreement of Sale Paranoia. You’ll be afraid to use the heating or air-conditioning systems; afraid to use the water faucets, turn on lights, or close doors firmly; afraid even to speak too loudly, for fear that you might set off some kind of sympathetic vibration that will cause the whole house to fall down. In short, you will become a crazy person. “YOU FOOL!” you’ll shriek, leaping out from behind your hedge and tackling the UPS man just as he’s about to ring your doorbell. “Are you trying to KILL US ALL?”
This is a natural reaction, but the truth is, you probably have nothing to worry about. The odds are that nothing bad will happen, and when you finally get to the Ritual Closing Ceremony, when you realize that the whole thing is going to work out after all, you’ll experience a feeling of relief, a feeling that will grow stronger and stronger until, moments before the sale is legally finalized, you are knocked to the floor by the shock wave from the gas main exploding directly under your house.
But you’re not going to let a little thing like the total destruction of your house, seconds before you were about to sell it, get you down. No, you are made of sterner stuff than that: you are a Homeowner. You’re not a particularly bright one, given the fact that you bought this book, but nevertheless you are going to pick up the pieces of your life, as soon as they come down out of the sky, and get on with your life. Because you know that you’ll have plenty more homes to own before you finally shuffle off what we in the real estate profession call “this mortal coil” and go up to that Great Subdivision in the Sky. I’m willing to bet there will be nothing in your price range.
Available now in bookstores everywhere!
DAVE BARRY’S COMPLETE
GUIDE TO GUYS
by Dave Barry
Published in hardcover by Random House
Turn the page for a sneak preview
from Barry’s outrageous new book …
INTRODUCTION
Guys vs. Men
This is a book about guys. It’s not a book about men. There are already way too many books about men. Most of these books fall into one of two categories:
Anti-Men Books declaring that men are oppressive, self-centered, testosterone-crazed scum who can’t even commit themselves to an entire TV show, let alone a monogamous relationship; plus they tend to think that they’re the only major gender capable of running large corporations and governmental institutions, despite the fact that the vast majority of them have never figured out how to do a load of laundry without having the
underwear come out purple.
Pro-Men Books declaring that men are, deep down inside, vibrant earthy spiritual beings who are capable of great sensitivity if they get back in touch with their inner selves via introspection and hugging and chanting and pounding on drums even though they may have no musical talent, let alone a bass player.
Don’t get me wrong: These books are fine in their place, which is garage sales. The problem with them, in my opinion, is that they take men far too seriously. “Men” itself is a serious word, not to mention “manhood” and “manly.” Such words make being male sound like a very important activity, as opposed to what it primarily consists of, namely, possessing a set of minor and frequently unreliable organs.
But men tend to attach great significance to Manhood. This results in certain characteristically masculine, by which I mean stupid, behavioral patterns that can produce unfortunate results such as violent crime, war, spitting, and ice hockey. These things have given males a bad name.1 And the “Men’s Movement,” which is supposed to bring out the more positive aspects of Manliness, seems to be densely populated with loons and goobers.
So I’m saying that there’s a third way to look at males: not as aggressive macho dominators; not as sensitive, liberated hugging drummers; but as guys.
And what, exactly, do I mean by “guys”? I don’t know. I haven’t thought that much about it. One of the major characteristics of guyhood is that we guys don’t spend a lot of time pondering our deep, innermost feelings. There is a serious question in my mind about whether guys actually have deep innermost feelings, unless you count, for example, loyalty to the Detroit Tigers, or fear of bridal showers.