Boxes, Staging, and the Miraculous Irishman

I know. I’ve been gone almost three weeks, which for Contra is a long time. Where have I been? Well, c’mon, where do I usually go?

We had a serious and difficult mission this time. Carol and I co-own a condo in Chicago suburb Des Plaines with our older nephew Brian, and have since 2007. Brian needed a place to live, and Carol needed a place to stay while she was looking after her mom’s needs during Delores’ last years. Carol’s mom is now Home, and Brian is married and has his own place down in the city. So it was time to sell the condo. Long past time, in fact.

Having been mostly vacant for over a year, the place was dusty and cluttered. So for two weeks we sifted and sorted and dusted and scrubbed and re-polished the oak cabinets. Brian and Alexis took trunks full of stuff home, and Carol and I shipped five biggish boxes back here, loaded to bulging with clothes, kitchen gadgets, towels, plastic hangers, stuffed animals, books, odd computer parts, and much else. (The boxes arrived yesterday, and my initial reaction to the pile on the front porch was: What the hell is all this stuff?)

One subtask was to sell the bedroom set in the second bedroom. It was a nice, rugged item, bought in 1977 and used by Carol’s parents for a long time. Carol figured out Craigslist, and listed it. Then the weirdness began. Many people inquired about it, some of them clearly on the far slopes of the sanity bell curve. A few came to see it. Some thought we were giving it away. Sorry, folks. “$100” is not a computer backplane. Several more seemed willing to pay for it, but had no idea how to get it home and broadly hinted that we should deliver.

Time was running out. We tried to give it to the Salvation Army, but they were unable to get a truck out for it any time soon. Getting the place ready to sell meant rearranging furniture, but until the bedroom set was gone we couldn’t even begin. Not quite three days before we had to hop a plane home, Carol got a text from an Irish chap who said he loved the photos and would bring his pickup over to get it. When he arrived with a hand-cart, he handed me $100, scratched his chin, and then got it out the door, down the elevator, and into his Dodge pickup truck all by himself. He was chatty, and all the time that he was strongarming dressers while talking about growing up near Ulster and encouraging me to indeed visit County Mayo, from which my Irish forbears fled bad harvests in the 1880s, I was boggling at the main force he was exerting, he who was barely my height and 47 years old. It’s not like he looked like a linebacker. Then again, my father didn’t either, as certain North Side toughs learned to their sorrow in 1939.

With the bedroom set gone, Brian and I shifted some desks and things around to make the now-vacant second bedroom look like an office, while Carol and Ali staged the condo. “Staging” means making it look like a model home. Some of this involves removing personal items and photos of relatives, and the rest getting the towels to hang just so in the bathrooms. Carol set the table as elegantly as Corelle would allow. Ali directed Brian and me in shifting the livingroom furniture here and there to get a balanced look. Four hours before our flight back, we looked around and said, Damn, is this our condo?

The unit is now listed on MLS, and our Realtor lady is actively showing it.

We’ll miss the condo. It served us well during a difficult time in our lives. Freeing up our equity will making certain things possible, like a winter place in Scottsdale. We’ll be exceedingly thankful when it sells. (I am already thankful to my late, beloved, and very Irish godmother Aunt Kathleen for sending us a muscular Irishman just when we needed him the most.)

And now, boy, is there some work to do, work that (huzzah!) has nothing whatsoever to do with real estate. More on this tomorrow.