“That’s it, a window in front of the sink, that is having made it” the realtor confidently boasted right before laughing with a very loud voice, an incredibly deep one. He looked like a very pleasant man, round glasses, like a Statistics professor or something, was a bit chubby but you could tell he used to lift back in the day from the size of his tailored suit around his arms. His voice was the most memorable thing, clearly it served as a sales tool as well. You could almost feel his laughter with your chest like if you were out in a club. Insane.
We kept looking around and, as you can imagine, the decisionmaker in disguise—the wife—was already sold on the kitchen.
Make it cute. Functional, with storage space and a peninsula and you are golden. Any extra is just insurance. That’s what I had learnt from staging my own properties but now I was on the other side of the fence and I just wanted to be done.
Viewings are painful.
“Look, we can sit the kids there after we cooked something all together while playing some jazz” she said with an angel’s face.
“Do you think that peninsula can hold the weight?” she said with the fallen angel’s face.
Fine, the gravel fell. I was sold on that last sentence. I thought I was a rational man and indeed I probably was up until I broke the rule to never ever take the wife with me to view a property.
I summoned my inner stoic, it was hard but I succeeded somehow. That’s life. Often, it gets good after it gets hard.
“There’s no extractor fan, how do you dry up your plates and stuff if you are washing something by hand? You know I basically meditate while massaging pans and giving them the odd slap to remind them who’s the boss” I jokingly answered her, knowing that she likes to do that. The meditating part.
Doubts started creeping in her head, I could almost see them visiting the left and then the right hemisphere.
“Yeah. You are not wrong… Let’s think about it” she replied, sounding defeated.
“Turn off your engineer brain. Turn on.” my tattooed mantra worked once again. I probably saved us a few grand already. Pavarotti noticed the change of tone in my wife and me heading for my shoes. Getting ready to leave after having checked the outside once more.