This time of year, crowds of people around the country get in the Christmas spirit by touring through handsome homes dolled up for the holidays.
I had never been one of those people, but this fall, my fiancée and I started doing our own version of a holiday house tour. But instead of marveling at pretty lights and halls decked with boughs of holly, we’ve been awed by 50-year-old bathroom heat lamps and halls decked with wood paneling.
Yes, we’ve started looking for a home. And no amount of HGTV could have prepared me for it.
There are plenty of things to come to grips with when house hunting—the looming six-figure debt, the ominous feeling that there’s a potential disaster lurking somewhere that must be found. Is the hot-water heater going to crap out? Are those cracks in the walls from settling or a failing foundation? And why are the neighbors throwing crabapples at your shed?
But chief among my anxieties is merely walking through the front door. It’s amazing what life can throw you just by stepping through a door jamb. But, really, I shouldn’t be surprised.
I had a rude introduction to the hazards of house hunting back in the early 1990s, when my folks were looking for a bit more room for their expanding family. As the oldest child, I got the honor of occasionally tagging along. That’s not sarcasm—even though I was in elementary school, I knew I had been given a bit of responsibility in a really big decision. And I thought it was really cool.
Well, it was cool until we toured a house in Hamilton Square whose owner had a peculiar sense of interior decorating. The pinnacle was a light switch cover that had an illustration of a man opening his raincoat to expose himself. The light switch had been strategically placed so that when you turned on the light, you apparently turned on something else as well.
From then on, I stayed home when Mom and Dad looked at houses.
Life came full circle last month when I brought Mom and Dad to check out a property. Upon our arrival, the owner claimed he hadn’t received the memo we’d be there, but he allowed us in anyway. We immediately walked in on a woman praying in the dining room. We continued to the master bedroom, where we encountered a man toweling off from a shower. In another bedroom were five people huddled in a corner, up to nothing in particular. The basement held some children playing, as well as surprises I’ll never know. Our real estate agent, who must have seen something, practically pulled us by our arms up the stairs and out of the house.
Touring a home has always seemed a bit invasive to me—having strangers open their home to you, only to thank their hospitality by ripping open closets and critiquing paint color choices. But having people in the house as we toured disconcerted me even more.
I give everyone in that home full credit for going about their business while we gawked at the trim in the dining room, but I really would have preferred the home’s owner had asked us to come back another time. There’s something surprising about discovering life goes on behind each and every front door you pass. It’s common sense, of course, that people would be living in these homes. But as humans, I think we prefer to think that all these places are sitting there just for us.
Oddly, I can sympathize, having been the victim of a real estate walk-in myself. While on a family vacation at a house we rented in Wildwood, I chose to spend the afternoon sleeping on the couch, only to be awakened when a woman clutching a clipboard flung open the front door. Trailed by a man and a woman, Clipboard Lady got a few steps into the home before she spotted me, and jumped with shock. Her shadows stared at me, their faces distorting with disgust. The realtor pushed them out of the house, shouting, “Sorry, I called but no one answered,” before slamming the front door.
I’m not sure why I startled her so much. If I—in my inexperience—have witnessed so much, I would have thought realtors would have been desensitized to unimaginable things completely.
But I guess even the best of us have a limit. Mine is perverted light switch covers. Hers so happened to be a sleepy teen in basketball shorts.
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