You know how real estate agents are always rattling on about their professional expertise in showing off a home to its best advantage?
Curb appeal?
Staging a home so it looks good to potential buyers?
I’d always half-suspected that they were just putting fancy names to common sense, to encourage home sellers to hire them.
Turns out, maybe they’re not kidding…
A guy named Leif Swanson has convinced me that common sense is in very short supply, when it comes to making a home look attractive to others.
Leif sells real estate in Arizona — a place I’ve never visited. I have, however, spent a good bit of time visiting Leif’s hysterically funny (and inspirational, in a what-not-to-do kind of way) Ugly House Photos blog.
And you absolutely must set aside the better part of a lunch hour to check out the What Were They Thinking?!?! category, at least. There, you’ll find such treasures as:
- Taxidermy and plaid couches;
- Improperly stored firearms in the kiddies’ room;
- Amateur paintings of nekkid babes;
- Stripper poles;
- People who should really have left the room before the photo shoot began;
- The world’s ugliest fireplace surround; and
- much much more.
But that’s just the beginning! The whole site is a glorious encyclopedia of how not to decorate a house that you’re hoping to convince someone else to buy. As Lief says, how you want to live is your business — your taste in decor is your own, after all — but it’s a whole different thing if you’re trying to sell the house.
Take these bedrooms, for example:
[click for more…]
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