Let’s Go Shopping

We went house-hunting on the weekend which is hugely fun and also exhausting. There’s something about looking through someone else’s house, seeing the bones of their life that can be a little eerie. Especially if it’s, like one of the houses we looked like, well past its glory days. This one was a 70s timewarp house but not in the good way (Give me a well-preserved 70s house museum any day). Once it had been a party house, the pool and the butler’s pantry filled with vintage ashtrays and cocktail making equipment was proof of that. Now it was all a little tired. The wallpaper was peeling off the walls. The lilac toilet and the burnt orange kitchen was proof that everyone briefly went colour-blind in the 70s. The hot tub looked festier than a bucket of Legionnaire’s Disease laced with the gentle dew of a thousand sweaty party goers.

We also saw a house being sold by a high conflict divorcing couple and that real estate agent spent a good twenty minutes telling us about all the meetings they’d cancelled on, the offers to purchase one or the other had rejected and the way both of them had flat-out refused to wipe the mould from the walls. Real estate agents apparently spending half their time as hard-nosed capitalists and the other half as reluctant life-coaches and counsellors gently prodding vendors towards a new life.

There was one house we liked. But so did the rest of Sydney. We stood and admired the view from the backyard with five other couples. We stood on the verandah and imagined ourselves enjoying the quiet afternoons with the same five couples. We could barely hear the real estate agent tell us he’d phone on Monday over the noise of everyone inspecting the ensuites and tramping through the kitchen. That’s the way it goes. If you want tranquility in real estate, go to the mould house or the festy hot tub mansion.

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Reading: The laugh out loud edition.