By Jo E. Prout
— Photo by Jo E. Prout
Beagle buddies: When Clara and Marcela are not busy with home-improvement work, they enjoy relaxing with their beagle, Annie. All three smiled for the picture, Annie most of all.There’s an office joke about how my house tends to need major improvements just in time for each special section. Since I’m footing the bill for these improvements, otherwise known as repairs, I don’t usually laugh.
When my editor, knowing that my home has been for sale for four years, asked me to submit a column for the Spring Real Estate section this week, I smugly smiled to myself; I had no column to write. Not only had no misguided Realtor or potential buyer insulted my taste or my home, but nothing requiring improvement had happened at my house in the last six months.
Oh, sure, there had been a nibble of interest in the house, but it hadn’t ended badly, merely awkwardly and disjointedly.
I’d placed an ad on Craigslist for our rural Victorian farmhouse. One woman wrote back, asking for more information and more pictures. She didn’t seem to be a scammer, so I responded. She said the pictures were beautiful and she asked to see the house.
While she may not have been a scammer, she could have been casing the joint — for what, I don’t know. Chewed up dog bones, or broken plastic toys, maybe.
She signed her name. I’m a reporter. Naturally, I looked her up. I wasn’t going to clean my house for a would-be thief. Worse than that, what if she didn’t have a pre-qualification letter from a bank? Horrors! No letter, no cleaning! No way!