Effective Staging Steps to Sell A Home Fast

We’d be a dream team, my spiritual twin, Sandra, and I, staging homes for sale. Odd that for the 30 years we’ve been pals, Sandra’s family has yet to move from her home by a creek, while my family has moved five times. I confess we met at our rented house, but with Sandra’s aid our family successfully sold three houses we mortgaged. She was my go-to consult for decorating various domiciles.

Decades ago she feathered and color washed our chair railed dining room. As I was about to exit for a meeting, Sandra arrived with supplies and a large board. I asked about the board. She replied, “I need to practice feathering before I start.”

I almost cancelled her first paid decor job. I thought of Dining Room Owner Two, my beloved hubby, who learned from his dad how to paint walls with nary a streak or drip. MBH ever ferrets faults in painted walls. But Sandra’s technique efforts wowed both he and I. So I snapped wall photos for her portfolio, as I deemed myself her unofficial, unpaid manager.

Sandra’s hands needed to beautify whatever she surveyed in a room. Of course she politely asked before she shoved someone’s couch or end table across the room. Watching her, I learned that well placed items could bless others. For me it would bless buyers to rapidly place offers on my former homes, ... houses, by the way, not in bidding-wars California.

This past week I helped Sandra’s daughter, M, stage her Deep South house for sale...


Clever sellers clean their homes into open canvases on which eager buyers can imagine their belongings. Clever M’s house had a great room busy to the ceiling with three artsy young kids, two hairy dogs, and one hubby with his military glue and paint models. What she did before she left the house to the Coldwell Banker realtor, any seller should consider as effective staging steps:

* Clear walls and ceilings of family items. Sticky toys will cling to vaulted ceilings.

* Caulk and clean and paint the cleared walls, as well as damaged baseboards and doors. She used a contractor recommended painter to paint the walls the new neutral, light gray.

* Hide in the boxes.  Box books, eclectic home decor, kitchenware, and excess toys. M orderly stacked boxes in the garage, so buyers could survey the car space. Rental storage units are useful.

* Erase your furniture. M and her husband already trucked their furnishings to storage near her husband’s relocation. Then M, the kids, and dogs returned to campout in the house.

* Beg, borrow, stage. Among my donations, M borrowed a queen air mattress, bedding, a wood/leather card table with chairs. M scrounged through my décor for floral arrangements, a modern vase, and a resin Celtic cross. On the fireplace mantle she placed my Hobby Lobby wired art that spelled B-L-E-S-S-I-N-G-S. Just a few, well placed items can pop a house for sale into a buyer's home.

Effective stagings could spell blessings to home sellers and buyers. Yet even more blessings are freely enjoyed by sellers or buyers or anyone who lives by faith with God in Jesus. In His house you'll find connected family and a home that's out of this world.

 Breathe, Part Three: Sent From Heaven Above

After my beloved hubby bless/kisses me goodbye around 6:30 in the morning, I often snuggle under the covers one hour more. Then like a trumpet reveille, our Timex radio blares Family Life Radio music. This June morning I beat the alarm and sat up, a Bible and devotional book beside me as dashing MBH kissed me, surprised. In a throbbing migraine, I struggled to verbalize an old off-Broadway show tune God played in repeat in my thoughts: 

We plow the fields and scatter the good seed on the land/

But it is fed and watered by God's almighty hand...*

When he left, I took up my laptop, turned off Wi-fi connect. Time to take a deep breath to share Almighty's hand in events one early evening mid spring.

On the road up from my childhood home, Mommy screamed. Suddenly, the side of a parked Tundra truck was a foot from my face. I stared in disbelief at the driver’s side mirror dangling from a twist of wires. My youngest sister’s hybrid console binged incessantly that keys were in ignition. Try I might, the driver’s door would not open for even a snake to slither out.

Over the smartphone my husband's voice reassured me from faraway Deep South. A hook and ladder drove up just as my second youngest sis pulled me over the seat console and out from the passenger’s side. Mommy's neighbors stood on the driveway, clutching unlit cigarettes. A young man covered my shivering frame with a puffy comforter. Then the truck's owner emerged from the house with a glass of water—for me!

His wife told me they were waiting for others to arrive for her birthday outing.  Mom and I were on a quick errand, as I had invited Sisters over for home-cooked Filipino dishes. The sisters who arrived on scene got uninjured Mommy home first, then me after the policewoman left. They would handle the cleanup.

On my mom’s driveway, I watched my shaky fingers fumble on the phone screen. Thank God my eldest son, Miguel, answered. Thank the Lord for the years my son worked in customer service quality control.

Miguel listened well to a panic of what ifs, mom hysteria, and verbal self-immolation. Like a great physician, he determined that I was sore and in shock. He had me do stretches, then had me drink more water. We chuckled as he realized aloud that water wasn’t good for someone in shock. Then his voice nudged me to my old bedroom's sleeper sofa where I elevated my feet and collapsed.

Phone records show my eldest stayed with me for 52 minutes. An hour of powerful mercy, Miguel calmed me. He breathed measured inhales and exhales alongside me. Oh so like his father breathed near me decades ago, as God sent Miguel into our world.

Such is the way of our Heavenly Father, to send the gift of a son into the world. In sacrificial love the Lord gave His Son, the only Son of God...

begotten, not made, 

of one Being with the Father

Through him all things were made

For us and for our salvation

 
he came down from heaven: 


by the power of the Holy Spirit 


he became incarnate from the Virgin Mary, 


and was made man. 


For our sake he was crucified under Pontius Pilate; 


he suffered death and was buried. 
On the third day he rose again…**

Oh thank the Lord in song:

* Steven Schwartz, Godspell

** Council of Nicaea A.D. 325, Nicene Creed

Breathe Part Two: Breathing for a Baby

May 31, 2014  As I ponder paint chips on our master bedroom walls—pastels, blues, whites, pale green, I recall the walls of the room where I birthed my first child. It was a wash of pale green, peeled and cracked on the concrete surface. The bed was small and, in the early 1980's, it had not a blink or beep from microchipped, diagnostic devices. 

This simple room was in a simple, sacred mission hospital upon the steep Himalayan foothills above Tansen, Nepal. There an American family on furlough let us use their apartment before our baby’s due date.

Away from the heat of the southern flat lands, we felt we were on a second honeymoon, smooching as the baby jiggled my belly. We enjoyed meals in the guesthouse and with families who were in our language class. We meandered foot trodden trails to stunning rural vistas.

Foothills near Tansen

After one afternoon trek, my labor started. My Irish midwife, Barbara, moved into our apartment. Just as we settled to sleep, around 10 p.m., it was time to hurry to the delivery room. I wore my own flannel gown as MBH carried a crocheted blanket my mom made. Then we met Nepali nurse, Vishnu, in a white cap and uniform green sari who helped us through the night.

Birth pangs ebbed and roared like tidal waves against the shore. I drifted in and out of sleepiness. Minute by minute, hour after hour MBH seemed always beside me, modeling the breath patterns he studied in the pregnancy book.  Slow breaths led to puffed pants, then slowed to deep cleansing breaths. In and out, in and out hour by hour, minute by minute, seconds by seconds.

We breathed in sync, MBH and I. As my pangs intensified, so did our breathing patterns, despite jagged spurts and contractions. My old diary reminds me that between breaths I also raved and ranted to give up the natural process with light meds. Thank God for God, Nurse Vishnu, Midwife Barbara, and dear MBH cheering me to carry on.

“It’s one less pain,” Barbara assured me often, in soothing Celtic tones. She nudged Andy to message my arm and move me into more comfortable positions. When dawn cracked, transition finally came, along with the delivery room staff. And finally entered the Doctor, an Aussie missionary, who spent then same night with a boy cut by a sickle, an operation on a four-day old baby, a predawn cesarean birth, and a patient who, in naive panic, mangled his IV tubes.

Dr. Geoff was there for me when it was time to bear down... once more and again. In my weariness I could not see that baby’s head had to be turned for the birth. I also couldn’t hear a baby’s wail.
Finally, at 5:25 a.m. Dr. G delivered my quiet baby, praying joyfully heaven’s blessings over us.

He quickly handed my baby to Dr. Sylvia, the German pediatrician. Her back to me, she cleared the mucus from our baby’s lungs. Her breaths via a tube blew the away the blue tinge in his skin. Then she turned to settle the baby in my arms.

His hair curled black. His fat cheeks were lively rosy. So handsome cute was and is he!

With many breaths my firstborn came to be alive and healthy. Thank God!

Thirty some years later this cheeky son would breathe with me via cellular devices... To be cont’d

BREATHE

Part One: Heartbeat for Us

On Thursday, April 10, 2014 far west of the Deep South, the earth pulled the sun to set lengthening shadows of the east face of the Santa Cruz Mountains. Lights twinkled along the El Camino Real, the King’s Highway. Long ago, Father "Junipero" Serra trod this coastal trail to establish missions, to spread hope and eternal life in his Lord, Jesus Christ.

Nowadays restaurants, malls, schools, and residences crowd the route between Missions San Francisco de Asîs and Santa Cruz to its south. Seekers of a golden life settle here, like my mother's family and my mother’s many siblings and their families.

My extended family gathered in an upper room of a medical complex along the King’s Highway. Auntie S. nudged her siblings to sing karaoke tunes with her. My uncles’ eyes glistened, rimmed with red.

They surrounded the bed of their 82-year young sibling. Her eyelashes curled above her high cheekbones like Sleeping Beauty. As in the previous ten days, unassisted, her lungs inhaled oxygen given her. She was hungry the first week and ate orally. Somehow without her daily dialysis, her renal system worked! For ten days her lungs evenly inhaled the oxygen provided her..despite a rupture from a cardiac arrest. With her complications, it was too dangerous to mend.

That evening one of sisters, a former nurse noted her breathe hasten and slow down, then hasten. "Cheyne-Stokes respiration," she called it over the phone, this the breath of one in heart failure.

When my aunt was a baby, my grandmother rushed her to the hospital before she was to be christened with the name "Violeta." In anguish she begged, “Dear Lord, please, please save my baby. If you save my daughter, I will name her Milagros; I will do so.” So it came that she was christened “miracles.”

Last time I visited Aunt M. we chatted in a nursing home north of the hospital. She pointed out at the left side of her body and wondered why it would not let her dance. Ten years or so after severe stroke, the Miracle Maker kept Auntie a jovial jokester. She let her daughter and others enhance her mature features with red nail polish and lipstick.

Friday morning I got the call that I knew would come. Just before busy Holy Week the Catholic priests and funeral directors couldn't arrange the wake and memorials until midweek after Easter Sunday.

In the tears of yet another farewell, I knew Fr. Serra's hope hugged me. Auntie Milagros' final miracle is to be alive and well in heaven. Her restored soul dances gorgeous on God's heavenly dance floor, which the Bible says is paved with gold. From there my Lord heartbeats forever joy, my Lord breathes forever health to all who by faith depend on Jesus as Savior and the Lord of perfect miracles.