Stupid but true

[james_davis_nicoll]

I like to look at online real estate listings to see how people use interior spaces. I've come to the conclusions that:

A: Few people use more than 2000 square feet effectively. Above that, they seem to run out of ideas about how to use each room*.
B: Lots of houses have gratuitous features whose purpose seems to be to make them unusable to mobility impaired people.
C: (this is the stupid one) Townhouses are fine but I hate the idea of a duplex. For some reason, having to cooperate with 50 people bothers me more than having to get along with one specific person or family.

* More libraries is always the right answer.

There was a place for sale just up the road from me whose entire basement was given over to sturdy-looking bookcases.

Comments

[elusis]

Books are apparently anathema to real estate "staging."

[kraig]

Yeah, I looked at hundreds of listings here back when we were buying the place I'm in now (2017, same cities as James), and as a hobby since I look around. I've no interest in selling, just... curious. And I think the vast majority of places are staged, and realtors are taught somewhere "live laugh love sells." And absolutely, no books! A shelf just gets in the way of those LLL stickies on the wall!

That said, every once in a while you see a listing where it's clearly *not* been staged, and freeooo. Some are interesting and some are, um, interesting.

[fred_mouse]

When we sold our (far too small for the people, let alone the library) house 20 years ago, we moved So. Much. Stuff. to the shed to stage, and that included a not-insignificant number of books. The person who staged the lounge room for us brought in their own very carefully selected colour matched set of books to go on a shelf - five very random books.

It is entirely plausible that this contributed to us getting 20K more for the house than we had expected. And I only had three thousand books then.

Almost none of the houses that we saw had much in the way of shelving.