Housebound in winter with daytime TV as company

I was sick with something recently I hesitate to call the flu. Without going into any nasty details, besides a touch of fever, it seemed more like a bad cold. Two friends recently commented on a strain of pertussis (aka whooping cough) going around. I didn’t get anything like that, knock on wood. I just felt lousy for a few days and was definitely avoiding the mirror; between the pasty skin and unwashed hair, I looked like a witch, or death warmed over.
While I was sick I decided to stay in bed, being a firm believer that when it comes to viruses, rest is best. Antibiotics, you may not know, fight bacteria, not viruses. So I huddled under the covers for an entire day, lacking the concentration to even read. When I wasn’t sleeping, I watched TV. Daytime television is really peculiar. You wonder who watches this stuff. There’s hours on end of various “Housewives” and home shopping and “Here Comes Honey Boo Boo.” There’s a lot of “Criminal Minds.” I watched two films made in recent years starring Jane Fonda. One was called, “Peace, Love & Misunderstanding,” and the other “Georgia Rules.” In “Peace,” Jane plays a hippie stoner grandma with long, sexy, curly gray hair who wears a tight, light blue denim jacket and, with a bunch of like-minded old ladies, bangs on drums and howls at full moons. In “Georgia Rules” Jane plays a kind but firm and fiery Midwestern grandmother to Lindsay Lohan’s damaged, destructive and disturbed young woman, not unlike her real self. It was rumored that the two fought like cats and dogs on set. I also twice watched a really terrible movie called “Family Man” with Nick Cage and Tea Leoni. I knew I had a fever because I watched it twice. No one in her right mind should accept Nick Cage as a family man, for heaven’s sake. Those blurry eyes? That hangover expression? His always slightly open mouth? Oy. That is not a look you want to see on a husband. But the movie was so bad it was good. I totally bought into Cage’s palpable anxiety about waking up one day to find himself living a life he never wanted. His trauma and then acceptance and then trauma again struck a certain chord. Haven’t we all imagined what it might be like if we had married someone else, pursued different goals, wound up in another house? The main reason I felt sorry for Cage’s alter-ego character was that while he did get Tea and two lovely children, he got a raw deal on the house. It was an awful house.
Speaking of houses, another show I relentlessly watched was HGTV’s “Love It or List It.” The concept is simple. A couple — always a youngish, relatively affluent couple —has outgrown their starter house. Using a budget of never more than $70,000, the renovation designer Hilary Farr attempts to make the couple love their home again. If they don’t love it and want to list it, real estate agent David Visentin is ready for them. His job is to find the couple another house to buy after they sell their old one.
After watching many segments of this show, which takes place in Canada, I began to wonder at how almost every couple decided not to list but to love. On the show, Hilary won them over again and again. The renovations are only able to go so far, but they said yes to their still-cramped quarters and inferior bathroom situations. They settled for a small wall moved and amenities like new hardwood floors or new kitchen cabinets. Even when David the Realtor pulls out all the stops to find them their dream space (now affordable once they sell their recently improved house), at the moment of truth they balk.
One of the reasons “Love It or List It” is so intriguing is because I’ve fantasized about listing for years. As empty nesters, we do not need this much house. I spend hours daydreaming about a nice tidy cottage in or close to town. But my husband says it makes no sense right now to swap out our current house.
This morning on the Today Show, real estate mogul and business consultant Barbara Corcoran put in her two cents about the housing market. She said that while nationally home prices are climbing, besides the island of Manhattan, big change has yet to hit the East Coast. Still, a strong spring market for this area is predicted, which makes it a good time to list your house. A tool Corcoran suggests for sellers is to have their home inspected and appraised before they list. She said that gives sellers a chance to remediate any problems or adjust the asking price accordingly for something they don’t want to fix. Big surprise, she said cash buyers are king. The toughest situation is having to sell before you can buy. Borrowing rates are low, but in the wake of the mortgage crisis, financing and mortgages for most people have been increasingly difficult to secure.
I think I know the reason why the couples almost always choose to love on “Love It or List It.” Thanks to the designer’s renovations, their present home has gained value. By not selling and buying, they avoid paying fees and closing costs. And even though they have their eye on a specific house the agent shows them, how do they know that house will still be available by the time they are ready to buy? They don’t, and there’s no such thing as bridge loans or contingency mortgages anymore.
It takes a huge leap of faith to make a move. That’s our task now. Should we love it or list it? Stay tuned.