PREPARING TO SELL

I never thought it would be EASY to sell my home. I’d never sold one that I owned, but my parents were serial monodomusites and we moved 5 times in my first thirteen years[1]. But I’d never been involved in the sale beyond having to toss some of my stuff in boxes or once going to the lawyer’s office to make the down payment and being all googly-eyed at the wad of bills my bank-distrusting father carried.

But while I never thought it would be easy, I didn’t think it would be the razor wire mobius strip it became.

It’s not like we hadn’t thought of it. We’d been on our way out of L.A. and I was going back to grad school when I got a temporary job at Warner Bros. Animation as a P.A.[2] That became a permanent job with promotions and the next thing I know I have an office, a secretary and a career.[3] Every year or so we’d reach the requisite number of episodes for an animated series and I’d start thinking of life after cartoons and every years we’d get picked up for another series and I’d get the requisite 5% raise and there I’d be. It wasn’t golden handcuff. Maybe brass, but really good brass.

Patricia and I wanted out by the time Lauren got to seventh grade. Lauren was born when there was still such a thing a Junior High school and we thought that would be a good time to make our escape. Then they went and changed the rules on us and created this Middle School thing and it didn’t look possible to get out by the time she hit fifth grade.

But then I made the capital error of working in a large corporation: I told the boss he was wrong. And then I was gone.

It was a relief really. I’d topped out and reached the Klingon level of show business: If I wanted to advance I either needed to kill my superior or defect to the Federation. I need a swift kick in the drawers and I got it by pointing out this particular emperor was in the buff.

So we started talking more seriously about leaving, but inertia works it’s magic. A year and a half later and I’m commuting one week a month to Montreal to work on a movie and we still haven’t made plans.

But the icing on the traffic cake did it. We kicked it into high gear. And by high gear I mean we started talking to people about it.

In late 2007 we had just topped out the market in Southern California. The bubble hadn’t burst, but someone was jabbing at it with a sharp implement.

Friends of ours had recently sold their house and purchased another and spoke highly of their agent. We invited Ingo Inept[4], licensed realtor, over for a meeting and liked him.

Ingo was about my age, a bit taller and had either once been the recipient of a hair transplant or, more sadly, had lost his hair in precisely the pattern that would mimic someone who, at a young age, had spent a large sum of money getting a transplant and then nature had it’s revenge by continuing it’s relentless march of deadening follicles.[5] The overall effects was not the intended youthening, but instead the top of his head looked like a fallen Mohawk surrounded by a Friar Tuck fringe which would be a mix of metaphors if you didn’t know exactly what I was saying. He wore a lot of sports coats and slacks with broadcloth shirts and no ties --- which was a look I always wondered about. Was it studied casual? It was Southern California where people wore gym shorts to fancy brunches[6] so why try to meet anyone halfway? Wear a tie or wear khakis. Don’t try to look like a New England doctor on vacation.

But if I held the way people dressed against them, I’d never work with anyone. My doctor wears clogs. So there you go. Can’t judge a book by the cover.

So Ingo showed up with a briefcase full o’ paper. He had comparables for every house sold in the area with particular attention paid to our sad little pad.

He showed up on time, which began to endear him to me. Hardly anyone in L.A. is ever on time. You’re either fifteen minutes early or twenty minutes late and there’s no way to tell which one you’re going to be. The best rule of thumb I found in my years there is that when you leave really early to make sure you’re someplace on time, that’s when everyone else who’s getting on the road at that time will have to stop to tie their shoes and you’ll get a straight shot to where you’re going.

Etiquette has turned itself upside down as a result of this. It’s not only correct to be fashionably late for a party, but in many cases it’s taken for granted that you’ll be fashionably late for business meetings as well. I’ve never been insulted by being called “That guy who’s always way fucking early” anywhere else. Nor do I expect to be.

And that was my motion picture agent who said that, by the way.

So Ingo started out well.

Ingo was a little over six feet tall and wore wire frame glasses on a longish nose and he liked to take them off and chew on an earpiece while he stared thoughtfully at you. This gave the impression that he took you seriously.

He wore the California compromise business uniform: Dress slacks, a sport coat and an open-collared shirt. From the looks of his stuff, he wasn’t a fashion plate but it was pricey. Brooks Brothers, maybe. It was one of those looks that was neither this nor that and I think it was cultivated that way. Like a lot of network TV, it was designed only to NOT offend and didn’t offer anything of itself.

And it WAS little. Three bedrooms. One bath. This had been the usual model of house when the wilds of Edgar Rice Burroughs estate were settled in the Fifties when America was rapidly suburbanizing. Ruth, our neighbor on the North side had bought her house in Nineteen Fifty-Six. She and he husband had been the second owners of the house, having purchased it in 1956 and they had raised two children to adulthood in that house with one bathroom. And she said they never complained. Her daughter told a wholly different story, but Ruth was in her 90s and we cut her slack if her memory wasn’t what it once was. When I was a wee tike, five of us lived in a four bed, 1 ½ bath house – and the half bath never really worked. It was nasty wooden closet in the basement that was cold and an excellent breeding ground for spiders. So when 17 year-old brother was bathing and shaving for the fifth time in preparation for a date and four-year old baby brother needed to pee --- four year old me learned to hold it, rather than brave the stinky room that John Carpenter wouldn’t film in – too creepy.

Of course, in modern times[7]people find one bathroom wholly inadequate. It was enough for us before our daughter hit the outer edges of puberty. Then hair care went from ponytails, or on a really sassy day, pigtails[8]. Ah, for days of yore when “Getting ready for school” meant making sure shoes were on and socks matched and not an argument over who had used who’s Paul Mitchel styling gel. So we needed another bathroom.

But we’d been in that house for 11 years before the need for another bathroom really became urgent. And by “urgent”, I mean “convenient”. We COULD have gone on with one, but I will point out that we were not looking for houses with one. Early on in home ownership, we had looked into expanding the house and had talked to contactors about expanding the house and putting another bathroom in. We’d talked about putting a toilet and an office off the kitchen, a W.C. off the kitchen, knocking out the back wall, turning the patio into a family room; adding a second bathroom and turning the second biggest bedroom into a master suite; knocking out the front wall and expanding the living room, and, most ambitiously, we briefly flirted with putting a second floor on the house.

In the end, we had the kitchen ceiling and floor redone, the bathroom floor redone and the living room/dining room repainted. THAT was enough of a pain in the ass with a crew of five coming and going, the kitchen out of commission for a week and when you could get in to make a sandwich or a bowl of cereal, you were likely to find it covered in dust just from walking through a house that was undergoing a minor renovation.

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[1] This did include selling one vacation home, so techinically they weren’t always monodomusites. But the laws on bigamy have changed since then.

[2] Production assistant. Part gopher, part secretary, part ass-kicker and all ass-kisser.

[3] “Career”: An equal number of admirerers and enemies.

[4] Not his real name. You’ll figure out why.

[5] Look at my picture. I know about this stuff.

[6] I saw it once at the Roayl Dining Room on the Queen Mary. But they may have been the royal gym shorts. I didn’t ask.

[7] What? When I was a kid it was ancient times?

[8] And I can braid, thank you very much, thanks to the Eighties “rat-tail” trend.

Entire Contents copyright 2009 by Shaun McLaughlin